Changing Places
Rating
The Pequod Review:
In Changing Places, a dull and indolent Englishman (Philip Swallow) is transferred for a semester from the conservative UK-based University of Rummage to liberal Euphoric State University in the US (which roughly approximates 1960s Berkeley). Meanwhile, his American counterpart (Morris Zapp) relocates in the opposite direction. The book becomes a very funny and intelligent satire not just about campus life, but the moral confusion from cross-cultural displacement more generally.