About: The Picturegoers

The Picturegoers (1960) is the first novel by British writer David Lodge. The novel interweaves scenes at and near a neighborhood movie theatre, using movies as a touchstone for exploring Catholic values in a changing world, where the cinema introduces values and behaviors from the greater society that differ from those of the traditional community. Various characters are portrayed, representing, to a certain extent, common types of people in a small earlyish twentieth-century British London neighborhood, though the focus is on one lower-middle-class family.