The Bookshelf: Betrayal and Witness

The Bookshelf: Betrayal and Witness

In Changing Places, the first novel in his campus trilogy, David Lodge has his characters at Euphoric State University play a party game called “Humiliation.” The players are literature professors, and a turn in the game is played by naming a literary work one has not read, and finding out which of the other players has read it—the more of them that have done so, the more points one earns. You can see that naming an obscure work will not earn ma…