Jonathan Coe: Lost Opportunity

This is the first part of a text I'm writing about my favourite novel writer Jonathan Coe. The other parts have not been written yet. All of the sources are only from his novels, so I did not use any secundary literature, which means this is only a semi-scientific approach, or, in other words, just for fun. I hope some Jonathan Coe fans will read it. For those who haven't read the novels I write about, this text contains some inevitable spoilers.

COE!, part 1

When you’re an absolute fan of a particular novel writer and you cannot stop reading his or her fiction, working yourself more and more into his or her storyworld, with a sheer conviction to read each and every novel, and a huge disappointment when there is nothing more to read – well, then you might get to start seeing connections and parallels between all of these novels. You get the idea that you can really theorize about this author’s work. While I am perfectly aware that no author really likes his or her work to be theorized, I think it would be an interesting thing to write in some generalizing lines about Jonathan Coe’s fiction.

Given the well-known fact that there are as many interpretations, or even version, of the same novel as there are readers, I still feel obliged to state that my “summarization” of Coe’s fiction is not even close to being exhaustive. As a matter of fact, it is only the tip of the iceberg, in that it can only be highly subjective, and there are many aspects that I am not even aware of. In fact, Coe’s fiction could perfectly contain some interesting elements which the author himself will not be (fully) aware of, although the bulk must obviously be attributed to Coe’s ingenuity. My objective is to point out a few characteristics of Coe’s fiction, some aspects that in my opinion are common in his work. I am not talking about the fact that some of them feature a middle-aged male protagonist who lives either in Birmingham or London, or about the fact that there is a lot of film obsession in at least two of his novels, but rather about his writing style, some recurring themes, structure… These general ideas will be illustrated by some very good examples, and it will be a pleasure to flutter through the pages of some of my favourite novels and partly revive the great experience I had while reading them.

At the moment I am writing this essay – let us call it an essay – Jonathan Coe is the author of nine novels up to now, eight of which I have read and will use as study matter. Whenever people ask me what his writing is about, I usually begin by saying that Coe’s fiction is openly critical of British society and that the political aspect is quite important to it. Furthermore, his writing is characterized by an enormous amount of wit. Among the types of humour he likes to use are wordplay (think of “the necessary biro” in What a Carve Up! (WaCU!)), satirical irony and especially situational humour, which has always been my favourite type of humour. Think of any British sitcom (what’s in a name?) and there you have it. In fact, many of the situations Coe’s characters find themselves in are very recognizable to the reader. There is indeed yet another aspect of his writing. Every single one of his novels is set in a fascinating storyworld inhabited by a cast of very humanlike and utterly recognizable characters. That is one of the many reasons why his novels are such a success and why many readers think they are so moving. Because of the characters’ high resemblance with real-life persons, most readers find themselves empathizing with many of them. Some of these readers in such a way that they begin to feel a character’s pain, share his or her joy, and feel empty when he or she dies. And there is as much to cry about as there is to laugh about. According to Coe, drama and humour are two sides of the same coin, and you cannot have one without the other. This idea is very perceptible in any of his novels. Some of the jokes need a long build-up, which might contain some very distressing events. Sometimes the very clue of a joke can be a very tragic event. Most of the time, such an event is followed by a funny passage, to lighten up the tone a bit. In any case, the marriage of drama and comedy is, in my experience, essential to Coe’s fiction.

There are some more generalizations to be made, one of them being the inevitable meta-level of the novels. Most parts of the novels are generally documents themselves. Both The Rotters’ Club (TRC) and The Closed Circle (TCC) consist of a heterogeneous compilation of documents: diary entries, newspaper accounts, letters, e-mails, interviews, reports… There are too many to mention. For most of these documents, it is easy to find out who has written it, but there is much information that cannot be attributed to any character, which impedes the process of source tagging (who has given the information? what is the source of it? the narrator? a character?). In WaCU!, the two last pages totally puts into question everything that the reader has learned in the 500 previous pages. All of a sudden, the very source of the information, which, up to now, had seemed fairly reliable, is not completely valuable anymore. The reader is not certain anymore of who has gathered all the information and everything he or she has learned so far has to be put in doubt. In The Rain Before It Falls (TRBIF), the middle part is actually the audio of a cassette that has been recorded by the main character, who, as the reader finds out, has died in the beginning of the novel. The much disputed ending of The Terrible Tragedy of Maxwell Sim (TTPoMS) is openly meta-linguistic, as the main character Maxwell Sim finally meets his Maker, in both senses, that is. Not only does he meet Jonathan Coe, his spiritual father, who tells him that he is not going anywhere because he is nothing more than a fictional character, but he also kills him off by simply stating that this is the end of the novel and that there is no so-called afterlife. The novel ends when the author wants it to end. The fact that this last chapter abruptly shatters the game of make-belief that is fiction, seems to have bothered many readers. The story they have been following is ultimately nothing more than a non-event – it didn’t happen because it is fiction – and the characters they have been empathizing with, only exist inside the covers of the novel. This pushed meta-level is typical of post-modernistic writing, and it is not the only aspect to be found in Coe’s work.

There are six intriguing aspects of Coe’s fiction I would especially like to draw attention to. First, I will illustrate the idea of lost opportunity in his novels. Second, there are some simultaneous storylines to be pointed at. Third, there is the observing quality of Coe, whose fiction happens to be called satiric realism. Fourth, there is the interesting structure of each of Coe’s novels. Fifth, Coe’s fiction is punctuated with ambiguity. Sixth, there are his endings, which often even add more ambiguity to the story that the reader has just finished reading. All of these aspects will be illustrated by examples from his novels.

LOST OPPORTUNITY

Recognizable characters are per definition anti-heroes. They are non-actual people whom the reader can identify with. This means that they are far from perfect and that they have (many) flaws. It is very common that they do not (immediately) succeed in their attempts. They generally aim for the attainable and somehow do not seem to be able to reach it. Not quite the Overreacher, they still fail to succeed. There is indeed a huge sense of failure in the modern novel, especially because life is prone to failure. Many characters in Jonathan Coe’s novels seem to even have some sort of aura of failure, and the cause seems to be hidden in a certain flaw at the very core of their individuality, which can have both comic and tragic effects. In some of Coe’s novels, a character’s search for that flaw becomes the very quest of the novel, as the character, after wondering for many pages what is actually wrong with him or her, slowly discovers the truth, and that is always a bitter pill to swallow.

Let us take Benjamin Trotter as a first example. However sympathetic the reader may find this character, it becomes more and more clear, especially in TCC, that there is something wrong with him. And Benjamin is perfectly aware of this, as he wonders in TRC why he has written a bad review about Cicely, the actress who plays Desdemona in the school version of Othello, and whom Benjamin has a major crush on:

Quite simply, some sort of madness must have seized him when he sat down at the typewriter that evening. Here, after all, was the opportunity he had been dreaming of for years: the chance to compose, not just a love letter to Cicely, but something infinitely more potent – a public statement of his admiration for her, a panegyric to her beauty and her talent which couldn’t fail to put her endlessly in his debt. And yet for some crazy, unfathomable reason he had done nothing of the kind. He had sacrificed this glorious opening on the altar of some half-baked notion of critical objectivity. Yes, her performance had been bad; of course he had realized that, of course he had believed it; but to have said so, in such uncompromising terms, when every motion of his heart was telling him to do the opposite – well, this was idiotic. This was perverseness of the first order. The whole episode, in fact, raised a much larger question, just as unanswerable, and one which was pressing itself upon him a good deal these days: what was the matter with him, exactly? (TRC 201)

During both TRC and TCC, Benjamin is doing everything he can to get closer to Cicely, and somehow, his own actions seem to check this significant goal. Cicely is Benjamin’s Holy Grail, but initially Benjamin seems incapable of approaching her in a successful way. It is when he least suspects it, that Cicely breaks the ice and they finally meet each other. It is ironic then, that Cicely is much impressed by Benjamin’s harsh review, and that this act of perverseness actually brings them closer together, something which initially had seemed absolutely impossible. But when it becomes clear to everybody except Benjamin that Cicely is the least suitable girlfriend imaginable, Benjamin either proves to be totally blind to their friends’ warnings, or simply chooses to ignore these facts. When, in TCC, twenty years later, Cicely seems to have abandoned Benjamin, the quest starts anew, and, like in TRC, Benjamin encounters many possible and much more suitable women than Cicely. Among them is his wife, Emily, whom he has married some fifteen years earlier, but their marriage is already a failed one. Then, there is Claire and her crush on Benjamin, who seems to ignore this fact as well. Each time Claire tries to show him her feelings, Benjamin clams up, and it is only afterwards, that Benjamin reflects on these moments as being lost opportunities: “As they left the café Benjamin managed to snatch just a moment’s eye contact with Claire; and then they were gone, leaving him bereft; gripped, after all, by an overwhelming sense of lost opportunity” (TRC95). This is a typical aspect of Benjamin’s. He has a realistic opportunity, against all odds, that is, but somehow he always messes things up.

As a reader, I had the feeling that Claire and Benjamin should have been together, but that they never have, although I’m not sure whether Coe intended this, or that other readers had the same impression. This lost opportunity also seems to have some sort of symbol. The yellow balloon Benjamin lost when he was a little child appears to become the icon of disappointment, of could-have-been, of, indeed, a lost opportunity. When Benjamin drives home after a meeting with Claire in TCC, he sees the same yellow moon that has always reminded him of Cicely and of how he lost her and of how he is now married to Emily, but actually, the symbol could perfectly apply to this new lost opportunity. He could have got closer to Claire. He could have gone home and talked to Emily about their problems. But instead, for the umpteenth time, he thinks of Cicely, because he cannot get rid of the past, because he cannot cope with this enormous sense of loss. In the following passage, however, something seems to shift Benjamin’s feelings in the direction of Claire, and the reader might create some sort of hope that they will finally end up in a relationship together.

And now, looking into his passenger wing-mirror and seeing the yellow moon reflected, and beneath it the lights of Malvern (one of them, he knew, the light from Claire’s sitting-room window), […] he felt a glow of pleasure, of comfort, at the thought that he and Claire remained friends even after two decades. But there was more than that: for at this moment he admitted to himself, for the very first time, that there had always been a desire on Claire’s part for something bigger than friendship, a prospect which must have scared him, before now, else why would he have denied it for so long, suppressed the knowledge so ruthlessly? But tonight, suddenly, he didn’t feel scared by it. Nor did he want to turn the car around, drive back towards Malvern, and spend the night with her. The feeling which came over him wasn’t as simple as that. It was merely that the combination of Honegger’s limpid melody and the yellow moon which was so much an emblem of his most primal wishes seemed tonight to take on the aspect of a sign: a pointer towards his own future – at the centre of which – distant but ever-present, ever-dependable – was the gleaming lamplight from Claire’s cottage. As the radiant certainty of this swept over him, Benjamin found himself shivering, and having to pull over to the side of the road to brush hot tears away from his eyes (TCC 221).

But this moment of apparent revelation turns out to be the last time he thinks (and feels!) about Claire in such a way. When he finally divorces from Emily and, after a period in which he hit rock bottom, he starts planning his new life, he initially cannot choose the woman he will have to spend that life with: either Claire, which would have been an obvious choice, or Malvina, a young woman whom he has these awkward meetings with and who is young enough to be his daughter. It finally turns out that she is his daughter, but Benjamin does not know this when he decides to text Malvina to tell her that they belong together. Very awkward, very humiliating, and very typical of Benjamin indeed!

Benjamin is not the only main character who could be said to have an aura of failure. Maxwell Sim turns out to suffer from the same life-hampering syndrome. On his way to the Shetland islands, he has arranged to stop in Edinburgh to meet Alison Byrne, a friend of old time. When they were in their teens, they used to have feelings for each other. But Alison gave him up as a lost cause when, after having made several explicit overtures, Maxwell still didn’t seem to get it. The following passage will illustrate his reactions to Alison’s overtures.

As I slipped out of my jeans and pulled my T-shirt over my head I could feel that his eyes were on me, although when I turned to smile at him he just looked away quickly. ‘Are you sure you’re not going to come in?’ I said, but he shook his head. He was smiling back at me but, as always with Max, it was impossible to say what the smile meant or what he was thinking. I stood there for a few seconds, regarding him with enquiring eyes, my hands on my hips – making sure he got a damn good look at me in that bikini – but still he didn’t respond, so I turned with a sigh and started to walk out into the water. (TTPoMS 175)

It gets worse when Maxwell turns the last night of that holiday, a night that should have been magical and the beginning of a relationship, into sheer disaster. It is more than thirty years later that Maxwell accidentally reads a psychological report entitled “The Folded Photograph” that Alison had written shortly afterwards, and finally learns about Alison’s feelings for him: “Things between us could have been very different, if he hadn’t been so fixated on the idea of starting a fire that last evening at the campsite. That had been our great opportunity, and once it had passed, maybe there was no going back anyway” (TTPoMS 182). When, thirty years later, both of them finally meet again, Maxwell thinks that Alison still looks smashing, despite her age. This time, he is well aware of the fact that she still harbours some feelings for him, and when her husband turns out to be cheating on her, Maxwell even feels entitled to encourage these feelings. This retrieval of that so-called lost opportunity is now served upon a platter and all he has to do is reach out and grab it. It is not too late for them to start a relationship, there is still hope for them. As they drive back from the restaurant, Maxwell’s mind is racing:

Was it actually going to happen, more than thirty years after it should have happened? Was I going to sleep with Alison at last? Was I being offered one, final, redeeming chance? Part of me yearned for this resolution; another part of me started to panic, to look around for excuses. (TTPoMS 238)

How typical of him, indeed. And how typical of Jonathan Coe to give a powerful and beautiful description of Max and Alison finally making love, one of the finer passages in the novel. What follows is a fast-forward summary of how their relationship continues: Alison gets a divorce from her husband and moves into a house with Maxwell and her children, and they are perfectly happy. But there is something awkward about this description. Maxwell tells the reader how art is useless if everyone “lived in a state of perfect happiness” (TTPoMS 241), and how he doesn’t need to write about the rest of his fulfilling life together with Alison. The reason is, he goes on, quite simply, because none of that actually happened. In the next chapter, the entire love scene and summary of the rest of his life is torn away from the reader’s mind and replaced by a new version of the facts: what really happened.

It was too good to be true, after all, but unfortunately, Maxwell feels obliged to confess that none of this happened:

I never knew that making things up could be so satisfying. I did enjoy my little fantasy about Alison, and our night of passion, and our subsequent life together. For a while there it almost felt that I was back in her house, back in her bedroom, that it was really happening, instead of the awful, miserable, fucking predictable truth, which was this: That I stood there like a block of marble while she did her best to come on to me. (TTPoMS 242)

The same thing happened as more than thirty years ago. Alison making overtures and finally giving up when Maxwell, paralysed by some sort of supernatural inaction, does not seem to react. Still, she gives him one last chance: “I’ve got a feeling I’m wasting my time here, but just in case, Max, I’m going to leave my bedroom door open.” (TTPoMS 242) However, Maxwell is consequent in his inaction and never gets up the stairs. He only seems to regret this briefly afterwards and is certainly not left with a huge sense of lost opportunity, but this is only clear at the end of the novel, when the author offers an explanation for this inaction. The entire novel has been one big quest to one of the most important truths about Maxwell, something which he only realizes in the end, namely that he is attracted to men. In Benjamin’s case, however, no such explanation is offered, except for his complex and complicated nature. Still, however perverse this inaction or even counteraction might seem, it is also one of the defining characteristics of many people, for whom this feeling of lost opportunity, of intrinsic failure is an almost daily fact.

A similar thing happens in WaCU!. Central to this novel, there is Michael Owen’s fascination of – or rather, obsession with – a film he saw with his parents at the cinema when he was only nine. During a particular scene between Kenneth Connor and Shirley Eaton, Michael identifies so strongly with Kenneth that he feels that he is Kenneth in that scene. But it is precisely at this moment that his parents leave the cinema and firmly take him with them. The last thing little Michael can make out is that after a provoking request on the part of Shirley to stay the night in her bedroom, Kenneth somehow decides to leave. On the way back home, Michael is still struggling with this enigmatic decision: “I look at my mother and I’m on the point of asking her if she understands why Kenneth ran away instead of spending the night with a woman who would have made him feel safe and happy.” (WaCU! 42) It is only many years later that Michael is finally able to watch the entire film and find out what happened next. The following passage is quite similar to the behaviour of Benjamin and Maxwell: “As Shirley said this, Kenneth turned towards her and leaned closer. For a moment they seemed on the point of kissing. […] Kenneth turned away. He said: ‘Yes, it’s – quite a good plan, miss, but, well …’ He got up and began pacing again. ‘… I – we don’t know each other really very well…’ He made for the door.” (WaCU! 48) Kenneth/Michael “quickly sneak[s] out”, as if afraid of physical, or even emotional, contact, with this beautiful woman.

Michael gets to know Fiona, who lives in his apartment, and they start going out, without rushing things too much. That is in fact the least you can say about Michael, who seems to be much more at comfort on his own, in front of the television, than with anybody else. When Fiona visits him for the first time, Michael’s thoughts wander away, and he even unconsciously tries to “switch her off”: “She nodded at my hands. I had gone back to the armchair opposite her and without realizing it I had picked up the remote control for the video. It was pointed in her direction and my finger had strayed to the pause button.” ‘ I think I’d better go,’ she said, and stood up.” (WaCU! 58) Fortunately, he is conscious of this rather peculiar aspect of his behaviour and tries his best to change: “And now suddenly, sitting by myself with only the television’s dumb flickering to combat the darkness, it seemed ridiculous to me that I should prefer these blank, unresponsive images to the company of an attractive and intelligent woman.” (WaCU! 144) Slowly, a sort of intimate affection begins to grow, in as much as a lump in Fiona’s throat is getting bigger. Michael is able to offer a comfort for her. The chapter in which Fiona tells him about the lump, ends with these beautiful words: “I clung to her in silence and, closing my eyes to our reflection in the kitchen window, pictured a knot, made from the threads of her wordless fears and my famished longing, which would hold fast against the very worst that the future might throw at us”. (WaCU! 238) And indeed, the future did throw the very worst at them.

A better example of lost opportunity concerning Michael in WaCU!, and one that better resembles the case of Benjamin and Maxwell, is the growing intimacy between Michael and Joan, a girl he grew up with, less than ten years before he meets Fiona. In June 1982, Michael travels to Sheffield to spend some days at Joan’s place, which she shares with two students named Graham and Phoebe. The fact that she still has a photograph they have taken many years ago, might be a pointer for Michael that Joan is still smitten with him, but Michael chooses to ignore the fact (WaCU! 268). When he meets Joan at the station, it is another woman he is thinking of: “Certainly it was Alice I was thinking of when Joan loomed out of the waiting crowd at the station, her welcoming smile and eager, waving arms striking despondency into my heart in an instant” (WaCU! 273).

When Michael is home alone and he enters Joan’s bedroom, he notices a copy of the very magazine that featured one of his stories in a box on her bedside table. The next night, when he tries to fetch the copy from Joan’s room without waking her up, he walks in and finds her asleep in bed, bare-naked, with the duvet partly thrown off. As Michael gazes at her body, he knows that he has never seen one as beautiful as hers and, whenever he thinks back of that moment, he realizes “that those few guilty moments were among the most glorious, the most unlooked-for, the most thrilling of [his] life.” (WaCU! 294) Michael and Joan spend some time together and it becomes obvious to the reader how deep her feelings must still be for Michael.

On the final night, he goes back to Joan’s room and finds the door ajar and the curtains open again, just like the other night. As if Joan wants him to have a good look at her nude body, as if she wants him to be Peeping Tom, to assume the role of Thomas Winshaw, whose section follows the final chapter of June 1982, and not coincidentally so. As he stands there gazing at her, he realizes that he is not looking at her body anymore, but at her face, her “shockingly beautiful” (WaCU! 303) face. All of a sudden, she opens her eyes, smiles at him and invites him in. The passage concludes with the following lines: “How different my life might have been, how very different, if I had stepped into her room instead of slipping back into the darkness as quickly and as silently as a dream slips from the waking mind.” (WaCU! 303) The next morning, Michael travels back to London and buys his first video recorder, a symbolic event that marks the beginning of the loneliest chapter in his life.

In The House of Sleep, Robert is the character with the aura of failure, of lost opportunity. But contrary to Maxwell and to Michael, Robert is very much aware of his love for, his obsession of the woman he is destined to be with. Like Cicely is for Benjamin, Sarah becomes the center of Robert’s life, his Holy Grail, the girl he secretly writes poems about, the girl he is desperately in love with and for whom he would do anything – anything really – with no limits whatsoever, to conquer her heart. But Robert is out of luck. By the time he gets to know Sarah better, she is already in a serious relationship with Veronica, a girl she only recently met. These two young lovers share a novel, The House of Sleep by one Frank King, in which they leave behind short love messages for each other. To see both of them together, to listen to Sarah talk about Veronica, drives the frustrated Robert totally mad.

Yet, however special and intense Sarah and Veronica’s relationship is, it does not last. After a shattering break-up, Robert and Sarah end up at a party in Ashdown, both of them very drunk. Robert guides Sarah, who just had a fit, to Michèle’s room, and, out of the blue, Sarah asks Robert to go to bed with her. Robert is much astonished and tells her that that might not be such a good idea, to which the light in Sarah’s eye extinguishes, after which she disappears into the bedroom: “She said: ‘No,’ and the word hung between them in the darkness and the silence, final, irrevocable.” (THoS 231) Sarah leaves Robert standing there, indecisive whether to follow her or to go to his own room. “He turned, and stood bewildered again in the darkness, shivering, paralysed by indecision, clenching and unclenching his fists.” (THoS 232) He is uncertain whether or not Sarah is “standing on the other side of the door, leaning against it, listening to his own irresolute movements in the hallway” (THoS 232) and he imagines that he can hear her breathing. Robert reaches out his fist to knock on the door, but doesn’t after all. Then he goes back to his room, realizes what has just happened and goes totally mad. The realization comes as a shock, a sharp sting of poison, and he knows that this will haunt him for the rest of his life:

He stood up and immediately reeled, partly with drunkenness, partly with disbelief. The scene he had just acted out with Sarah seemed to defy comprehension: half of him wanted to erase it at once from memory, while the other half struggled to revive and dwell upon every detail. Had she really, really asked him to do that? And had he really refused? This will never happen again, he told himself. She will never ask you again. (THoS 233)

He tells himself to go back, but he staggers and falls to the floor, injuring himself. He thinks of all the poems he has written for her and wonders “[w]hat was the point of all that secret labour, that time-consuming, interiorized donkey-work, if, when the opportunity to act upon his desires was offered to him on a plate, he had neither the courage nor the presence of mind to seize it?” (THoS 234) All of a sudden, he feels the urge to write something – not a poem this time, but something else, something more tangible, something more true to what he really feels – and as his anger, his self-contempt, his, indeed, overwhelming, nauseating sense of lost opportunity eventually takes shape of two words, written on the bedroom wall – STUPID FUCK – he bangs his head against the wall, smears his blood all over it, and falls down on the bed. It is this passage that most strongly reveals and symbolizes this enormous feeling of lost opportunity to me.

The next morning, Sarah tells him that she just wanted to use him to hurt Veronica and that it would indeed have been a mistake. She also says that they can only be friends, nothing more, and, once again, Robert asks her if she is sure of her nature, of her sexuality, to which she replies that she is, but that, if things were different, they would have been perfect for each other, and that Robert’s twin sister would be an ideal partner for her. By now, the reader might suspect a possible turn of events here, since many textual clues have already lead up to Robert’s final decision, but this is a train of thought the reader might not want to continue, for it is outrageous, it is far-fetched and it would be preposterous. However, the unimaginable happens and Jonathan Coe manages to render it in a natural, credible way. Robert goes “one step further” (THoS 300) and thereby resorts to an ultimate leap of faith.

But when, many years later, he – or, more precisely, she – learns that Sarah is not gay, or at least not anymore, and that she has married, Robert – “unmanned” now, transformed into his fictional twin sister Cleo – breaks down again, finally realizing that this was it, that there is “no shadow of another meeting with her” (THoS 311). Robert has stepped out of the ordinary and has become a classical Overreacher, doing the impossible in order to attain… the once attainable, but now unattainable. He dramatically fails in his attempt to win her heart.

Yet, all is not lost, and after hearing Ruby giving him hints in her supposed sleep, Robert, or Cleo, travels to London to go and find Sarah. Ruby knows that they belong together, Robert knows that they belong together, the only thing the reader cannot possibly know is whether Sarah’s feelings for Robert will still be strong enough, whether she will be able to cope with the huge change Robert has undergone, only for her, whether even this gargantuan metamorphosis will eventually be enough for Robert to “earn her”. An open ending if ever there was one.

Books discussed

Coe, Jonathan. What a Carve Up!, 1994, London, Penguin Group, 1995.

Coe, Jonathan. The House of Sleep, 1998, London, Penguin Group, 2008.

Coe, Jonathan. The Rotters' Club, 2001, London, Penguin Group, 2008.

Coe, Jonathan. The Closed Circle, 2005, London, Penguin Group, 2008.

Coe, Jonathan, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, 2010, London, Viking, 2010.


Here's another interesting article on Jonathan Coe's writing: http://mariapoeana.com/articles-reviews/5-books-that-make-jonathan-coe-a-great-writer