Nice Work is the third and final in David Lodge’s “Campus Trilogy” (preceded by Changing Places and Small World: An Academic Romance), published in 1988 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Lodge, still alive at the time of writing, has written around ten other novels, and much literary criticism, including the recommendable Art of Fiction, a collection of short essays on literary form originally published by The Independent On Sunday. I’ve not seen the musical Nice Work If You Can Get It from which the novel’s title is presumably drawn, and won’t be able to comment on that thread (or old rag).