Therapy, by David Lodge (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

Pain, they say, is a warning that something is severely amiss: but when Lodge's latestanti hero, Laurence "Tubby" Passmore, starts to get twinges in his knee, he doesn't despite regular cognitive behaviour therapy, aromatherapy, acupuncture, physiotherapy and acupuncture sessions immediately connect them to his lifestyle as a successful TV sitcom writer with an intelligent wife and a flash car. Worse, when he wife announces that she is leaving him, he is so engrossed in Kierkegaard that he doesn't even hear her. Lodge pokes happily around in the muddy puddles of our bourgeois nightmares, using an impressive array of comic tricks to sustain the momentum. It falters towards the end, but the overall conclusion has to be that Therapy is good for you.