In David Lodge's fiction, it's difficult to discern the difference between intellectual and sexual tension. In his 1990 novel Nice Work, for example, Lodge made an unlikely couple out of a post-structuralist academic who wrote off love as a culturally created fiction, and an unhappily married businessman who pined for the love described on the Jennifer Rush tapes he played in his car. Letting them hash out their philosophical differences in debate and in the bedroom, Lodge created a clever comedy of modern manners that also served as a terrific primer in contemporary literary theory. Lodge opts for a similar gambit in the new Thinks…, in which widowed novelist Helen Reed, having taken over a creative-writing seminar at the fictional University Of Gloucester, finds herself thrown into the company of Ralph Messenger, a philandering cognitive scientist. Both of them, they discover, are engaged in exploring the notion of the human consciousness, albeit via radically different approaches. Lodge himself tries something different, if not radical, with Thinks…, by rotating entries in Helen's journal, an omniscient third-person narrator, and Ralph's quasi-scientific experiments in recording his thoughts as they occur to him. Both his protagonists make excellent cases for their points of view, but Lodge takes no sides. The form occasionally gets the better of the gently funny and informative novel's momentum, but, as usual, Lodge makes his academics' foibles endearing. As knowledgeable as they are about the workings of the mind, they remain strangers to the mysteries of their own hearts.