"Nice Work" is a postmodern novel written by David Lodge. It is about a man and a woman called Vic Wilcox and Robyn Penrose, who live during the terminal crisis of capitalism.

The first chapter makes a description of Vic Wilcox and it ends with the description of his job.

The second chapter is the profile of Robyn Penrose and right from the start the intelligent reader understands that Robyn is a strong-minded person which thinks in a postmodern way. The three paragraphs at the start are a criticism against middle class and capitalism.

The first paragraph underlines the adversity to the concept of "character" because it is a bourgeois myth grown with capitalism.

In the next paragraph Robyn says that novel and capitalism are the expressions of a secularized Protestant ethic, they depend on the idea of an autonomous individual self who controls his own destiny and it seeks happiness and fortune in competition with other autonomous selves.

The third paragraph tells that there is no essence and soul on which capitalism and novel are founded: novel is only a production of a novelist who talk about everything of human life and capitalism is the need to have more than the others. In contrast with this strong beliefs Robyn appeared normal to the others and she seems to have the same feelings which an ordinary person has.

The last paragraph is about how she unusually wakes up in the morning and also her relationship with job. She wakes up at 7.30 every morning and she immediately worries rush into consciousness as a patient who have expected the all night the doctor surgery's to open. This way of waking up is so strange because she is immediately active and nervous for the day. This aspect of the character comes out also in the anxiety of beginning a new term and fear is compared to an actress that shouldn't be immune from stage fright. In the end she makes some yoga exercises to calm herself and to start a new day at the University of Suffolk.