Professor of linguistics Desmond Bates retires early due to his worsening hearing loss. At the same time, his wife is experiencing a second youth, while the health of his also hearing-impaired father is going from bad to worse. Under these circumstances, Desmond meets Alex, a charming student who asks for his help with her thesis, which involves discourse analysis of suicide notes. He offers to help her, not knowing what awaits him. In this novel, Lodge writes with bone-crushing humor about human relationships, midlife sexual life, hopes and disappointments, decay, and death.

“He longed for the rhythm of the academic year like a peasant would long for the change of seasons if it suddenly ceased to exist, and he also discovered that he missed even the structure of the academic week, the daily agenda of assignments, supervising graduate students, correcting essays, committee meetings, interviews, and deadlines for one report or another, routine tasks that made him grumble, but whose completion, no matter how trivial or ephemeral, offered a low-level satisfaction and ensured that you would never, ever be faced with the question: Where should I drag my carcass today?”