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In Changing Places David Lodge evolves in the direction of the «problematic novel», a category he characterizes in -The Novelist at the Crossroads- as a «novel-about-itself», a «game-novel» that leaves the reader not with any simple message but with «a paradox about the relationship of art to life-. Changing Places -published in 1975- is not content with capturing reality through just one literary tradition and emerges as an attempt to make realism and metafiction coexist. Lodge, combining accessibility and experiment -in the manner of most British metafictionists- has achieved a kind of compromise between experimentalism and realism. I propose to start the present study with a brief description of the connections of Changing Places and metafiction, which is not intended to be exhaustive since the topic has already been tackled by several critics. Then, I will focus on proving how the novel constitutes a further stage in Lodge's battle for realism. In my view, David Lodge resorts to metafictional strategies in order to undertake a renewal of the realistic mode, a task which requires from time to time the challenge of alternative conventions. I will also analyse Changing Places as an attempt at containing, controlling and cancelling the potentially subversive, experimental energies of postmodernism.
