In the summer of 1982, a young boy who maybe preferred movies and sports to books chanced upon Danny, the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl's novel of a nine-year-old who learns pheasant hunting from his father.
The boy was startled by the book's mystery, its power, its poignancy. Okay, so maybe precociousness increases in retrospect. There was no denying one thing, though: the novel had a powerful, palpable sense of reality. Finally the boy could understand what people meant when they said they could get lost in a book.
That feeling returned only infrequently over the years. Then last summer, on the recommendation of a publishing friend, the boy, now grown, picked up The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe. And the feeling was back.
The Rotters' Club would not seem to have the makings of a seminal work. Published in 2001 but set in the industrial, pre-Thatcherite England of the mid-'70s (also the author's boyhood), it follows a group of mostly middle-class English teenagers in the nondescript English city of Birmingham (also the author's hometown). Chiefly it tells of the Trotter children—romantic older sister Lois, creepy younger brother Paul, cautious middle-child Benjamin and a cast of teenagers and parents around them, from a womanizing union leader to a classroom prankster. All are up to the funny, messy business of raising a family or growing up (sometimes both simultaneously). Colorful stuff, but not the stuff of greatness.
But as the book progresses, its ambition becomes increasingly apparent. While familiar enough to give us what we want from a bildungsroman—self-recognition—it's also different and original, embedded with hilarious faux music reviews, tales of violent union protests and a short story about an escape from the Nazis. Coe's got more on his mind than a bunch of teenagers. The country (and world) were changing in dangerous and alienating ways in the mid-'70s, as the IRA upped the ante with street violence, labor struggles threatened to bring the country to a halt and Britain transitioned from an industrial age to a technological and corporate one. Coe's story of adolescents saying good-bye to all that is subtly microcosmic, the story of a culture facing the same crossroads.
Indeed, what Coe has managed is the tricky feat of depicting the claustrophobia and vulnerability of youth without sacrificing larger political and cultural truths. He gets both the kids andthe adults right.
Yet despite its near-perfection—comparing The Rotters' Club to Nick Hornby's Booker-nominated How to Be Good, the Independentmemorably said, "The Rotters' Club has more heartache, humour, brilliance and wit in 10 pages than Hornby's po-faced plodder"—Coe decided it wasn't enough.
In a note at the end of Rotters' Club, he tossed down a gauntlet. He would write a new book, he promised, one that would tell us how it all turned out. It was a daring move. Most great books leave the reader to continue the story in the pages beyond the final chapter. Coe wanted to fill in those pages himself.
The Closed Circle, published last year in the U.K. and stateside by Knopf earlier this summer, is the fulfillment of that promise—sort of. Jumping 25 years to the present, it's a sequel that's really a book-length epilogue, slaking our curiosity over where so many childhoods (and, perhaps, childhood as a whole) led.
The destination is far from a happy place. The teenagers are now in their 40s and for the most part just getting by. Theirs is an unrealized existence full of attempts to reclaim the past: a writer who seemed destined for greatness is stuck in an accountant job; a pundit watches his career unravel. Yet the book is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is structural. Plot lines curve perfectly from the first novel to the second; minor characters or details from page 100 of Rotters' make unexpected, and persuasive, returns late in Circle.
As the story moves along, it dawns on you that Coe has not so much written two novels but has simulated the temporal aspect of lives lived. You once knew these people but you lost touch; now they're back and you're making up for lost time. "In the back of my mind I wanted to write six volumes," he tells PW when we meet at a London cafe. "And when I started writing The Closed Circle that's what I did, only that I skipped volumes two, three, four and five."
What's nice about this conceit is that it allows him not only to track characters' full arcs but to take an expansive view of the world. By writing of fading innocence and then zipping ahead to the consequences, he can tell of both history and modernity. Think of The Rotters' Club as a sort of cultural time capsule, and The Closed Circle as what happens when you open the box.
What's inside, usually, are disappointments as deep as the characters' own: failed liberal utopias, cities gone intimidatingly upmarket, and Coe's bugaboo—the triumph of Tony Blair and New Labour. Everywhere you turn, the whiff of resignation lingers. "I think when you hit 40 you realize you're basically the kind of person you're going to be," Coe says. "You're going to live with that in a kind of stasis. In a way, Britain has reached the same point—the nature of the political path we're on has been decided long ago."
Such pessimism caused some critics to dislike Circle, and even some liberals thought its beleaguerment suggests too easy a surrender on issues like workers' rights and class equality. But Coe doesn't flinch. "You had your light [with Rotters' Club] and now here's your shade," he says—though only a certain sort of (British) soul could think of The Rotters' Club as light.
Still, Circle has its shortcomings. As with most Coe novels, it has a weakness for contrivance (like Henry Fielding, an obvious forebear—and Coe's dissertation subject). Nor is description a priority. And when he's at his most political, he can be heavy-handed. But for the most part these are happy trade-offs. Coe's attention to wit and character, and his treatment of the novel as a puzzle with many movable narrative parts, ensures that his books are, uncommonly, both artful and highly enjoyable.
The Obscurity Legacy?
So with all this scope and talent, the question is: why have so few in the U.S. heard of him? In the U.K. several of his books have been bestsellers, The Rotters' Club was turned into a hit BBC miniseries, and his biography of the experimental writer B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, a blend of memoir and biography about—what else?—an underappreciated artist, won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize earlier this year. (It was pubbed here by Continuum.)
Some publishing executives cite the British problem, though his books are hardly more Anglophilic than Nick Hornby's or Zadie Smith's. Nor is he unfamiliar with American culture: he spent his early career writing bios of such Hollywood celebrities as Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. And he has his influential fans stateside; a Random House rep for New England is said to go "into religious ecstasy at the thought of Jonathan Coe."
There is, of course, the issue of marketing. Knopf, thanks to the enthusiasm of Sonny Mehta and Gary Fisketjon, has published him for four books in this country over nearly a decade (after Coe's agent, Tony Peake, mentioned him to Fisketjon), but its release of The Closed Circle several months ago raised barely a sound. To be fair, the book was a study in promotional impossibility: a sequel to a plot-heavy novel that itself had barely been read here.
But other Coe books have had more obvious potential. It's a surprise that The House of Sleep, about a group of dysfunctional subjects who come together as part of a study of dream and love, didn't resonate. And Coe's playful blending of categories could have nabbed several audiences with the excellent What a Carve Up! (The Winshaw Legacyin the U.S.): the book is a British detective story, gothic melodrama, political novel, screwball story, and a satire of all of the above.
"It's the $100,000 question, I suppose," Fisketjon says, when asked why Coe hasn't had more success. "There's the natural resistance of the marketplace," he suggests, with the passing of the era when Ishiguro and Rushdie and young British novelists found a wide American audience. But in the end, he says, he doesn't know, only that he's confident Coe's popularity will grow.
The U.S. critic David Kipen, who has given whopping endorsements to several Coe books, suggests that Coe might be "in the same position as McEwan was before Amsterdam—he just hasn't written the international breakthrough." The question, then, is whether he has in Fisketjon what McEwan had in Nan Talese—an evangelist whose years of lobbying will eventually pay off.
All of these questions of taste, of course, can start to feel a little pointless—boyish, if you will. Why a great writer isn't more successful is a little like wondering why Betamax didn't beat VHS. As the struggling types in The Closed Circle could tell you, some things just are. Besides, maybe it's better this way. After all, Danny, the Champion of the World wasn't Dahl's most successful work either.
