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Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 27 May 2010.
Jonathan Coe is a great observer of human nature and once again he gives us a thoroughly believable and sympathetic character in Maxwell Sim. Small, and sometimes seemingly insignificant, decisions can make such huge changes in our lives and this seems to always come through in Coe's novels. Brilliant, funny, poignant - Coe is one of the best writers of modern times.
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Synopsis
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe
Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom. Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way - a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles. Setting out with an open mind, good intentions and a friendly voice on his SatNav for company, Maxwell finds that this journey soon takes a more serious turn, and carries him not only to the furthest point of the United Kingdom, but into some of the deepest and darkest corners of his own past. In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time.
Reviews
It takes real panache to write with such comedic ease; his pacing throughout is superb and delivers realististic dialogue, and, hence believable charcters ... Coe's sympathy for his creation is contagious -- Robert Epstein Indpendent on Sunday Max is silly but he makes him more than a figure of ridicule. Instead, he understands him, shows us what it is to be ineloquent in company, to have bland tastes and a childlike need fot sameness, to not be very good at things. Through that understanding he gives us witty and tender humanity, and reminds us that while winners write the history, it is life's losers, such as Max, who have the best stories -- Simon Baker Spectator Coe takes a risk in using the nerdish Sim as principal spokesman, but he carries it off by empathy, comedy and a venriloquist's ear for idiom. The conclusion to this fine novel, an ending in which Jonathan Coe himself plays a speaking part, is witty, unexpected and curiously unsettling -- Pamela Norris Literary Review The Terrible Privacy is more intimate than Coe's previous novels. Coe may blackly satirise an atomised 21st-century Britain pockmarked by Travelodges and in thrall to the empty caress of instant messaging but this geographical and cultural hinterland is really a physical correlative for Sim's existential crisis -- Claire Allfree Metro Cunningly plotted, extremely well-written and very, very funny -- Mark Sanderson Daily Telegraph An engaging novel -- Lianne Kolirin The Express Coe's book is as funny and as well written as you'd expect: even the banality of Maxwell's mind is rendered deadpan, with wonderful lightness. It is archly and artfully structured, too; though I can't, without spoiling a plot that delivers revelations and switch backs in careful sequence, go deeply into how -- Sam Leith Prospect Magazine Coe has always been a virtuoso of voice. He is the master of the kind of distinctively English comedy that has its roots in Fielding and Sterne -- Jonathan Derbyshire New Statesman Funny and touching Grazia A highly engaging portrait of both a man and a society that have lost their way -- Michael Arditti Daily Mail The plot is everything Max is not: clever, engaging, and spring-loaded with mysteries and surprises -- Caroline McGinn Time Out London Exceptionally moving...[managing] to tell us something about loneliness, failure and the inability to cope that we haven't quite read before -- Alex Clark The Guardian Very funny RED
About the Author
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Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include , The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
The House of Sleep won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997.
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Categories
Literary / Contemporary
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