I agree about Hynes's book, and I wonder if it's a problem in academic novels. The central character, the hapless middle-aged English prof, tends to be incapable of heroic or even vivid action, so there's no colorful or surprising or even very interesting way for the story to end. Maybe the problem is with the lives of English professors.
Moo, which I read long ago, ends with some kind of riot, which is better. I don't even remember how David Lodge's novels end. And of course the academic sleuth novels always end by solving the crime.
The Fiona
To be honest, I can't remember how Moo ended, but it didn't leave me with that unsatisfied feeling. Nor did
Straight Man.
Changing Places ends, I think, with all four protagonists meeting up somewhere (NYC?).
Small World ends with Persse standing in Heathrow, about to embark on another quest.
has an ending that wraps up plots and subplots neatly - deliberately almost too neatly, following the 19th C. novels it is paying homage to. Of course, it also has a different protagonist, a younger female prof, and the problems of the novel are caused by the exterior setting as well as interior dilemmas, so it isn't an example of hapless middle-aged prof lit. I think the English prof/writer in midlife crisis plot is so common because, well, "write what you know."
I loved
Nice Work and think of it regularly, more so than the others. Perhaps for generational reasons, or because the dilemmas of that novel seem more contemporary for academia and industry today. Or because I grew up in a decaying industrial city, as well.
Mixing literature and film further, the title, "Nice Work," reminds me of a recent French film, <<Beau Travail>> which, now that I think of it, has in its own somewhat twisted way a very similar plot line--at least, at the end the instructor loses his job and the issue is an affair of the heart.
But the details are a bit different: it's a special elite group of the French Foreign Legion posted somewhere really hot (presumably Algeria) where the guys in the troop train all day and night to be able to run serious obstacle courses and do hyper-calesthentics (the cinematographer clearly worked hard at/enjoyed showing their musculature from behind....).
The troop leader is a tiny, intense fellow who seems to develop, first, animosity, then, a stronger affection for, a new arrival whom he finally "tests/punishes" by an orienteering exercise in which he gives the man a near fatally-flawed compass. The ploy is discovered and he's court-martialled out of the Legion.
The last scene shows him setting up his lonely bunk in a (?Paris/Marseilles/somewhere in France)
pensione and going to a dance, where the hip-hop-like solo he begins to do is eerily like the calesthentics he used to teach. (A movement parallel to show dance history classes, if anyone's interested--ditto the engagement dance and the shooting enclosure in "Four Feathers," to digress a bit more.)
I have no idea whether the director had the other book in mind or not, although the similiarity of the two titles and the (very broadly interpreted) plot lines suggest it's possible.
