Summaries - Your Texts - Your Stuff!

Back to Summaries

A 300-word summary of David Lodge's novel Therapy

Therapy - summary
by Nieves (Y5B, 2006-07)

Laurence Passsmore (“Tubby”) is married  to Sally. They have two children Jane and Adam. He is a writer and earns a lot of money from a sucessful sitcom “The People Next Door.” She is Principal Lecturer in the Education Department at Rummidge Poly. Adam works for a computer software company in Cambridge and his wife teaches Art History part-time at the University of Suffolk. Jane, who did a degree in archaeology, works at a museum. Gus is Jane's boyfriend. He is a stonemason.

Laurence had a knee operation, but his knee is still giving him pain. So he starts going to therapies - the physioterapist,  the aromatherapist, the acupuncturist, the cognitive behaviour therapist… He thinks that sport is a form of therapy. Tennis is a harmless way of discharging tension, sluicing adrenalin through the system, and helps him to sleep. So he plays tennis with three other middle-aged cripples called Joe, Rupert and Humprey. They exploit each other's handicaps mercilessly.
           
Amy is Tubby's mistress.  As soon as they have to share toilet in Tenerife, they begin to see each other in a completely different light. The problem is that when Tubby pulls the chain the turds keep dancing about merrily in the water and refuse to disappear. He gets rid of his pellets pushing them round the siphon with the toilet brush.

Suddenly, the break-up of his thirty-year-old marriage embarks him to Maureen, Laurence's first girlfriend. She is making the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela on foot on her own because of the death of her son. Laurence drives from London to Lugo looking forward to seeing her. They meet her near O'Cebreiro, a place associated with the legend of the Holy Grail. They arrive at Santiago de Compostela where they go to bed -- her sexual life with her husband was over due to her breast operation --, he asks her to marry him and she says no.
           
Finally, Tubby, Maureen and her husband decide to go together to Copenhagen.