DAVID LODGE’S NOVEL opens just after World War II in England, when the seventy-nine-year-old H.G. Wells has just learned that he is dying of cancer. Seeing himself in the shadow of modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, he feels “old hat,” “a lone voice, crying in the wilderness.” The story then flashes back, as Wells comes to terms with his books and mistakes and extramarital affairs (with Rebecca West, among others) and children that he fathered out of wedlock. In Lodge’s hands, Wells is so fully fleshed out that A Man of Parts is one of the best biographical novels in quite some time.
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