A conversation with Jonathan Coe

The author of "The Rotters' Club" talks about "pleasuring the reader," Henry Fielding, Dickens, Angus Wilson and Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon.

Editor's note: dc

By Charles Taylor

March 12, 2002 | If there's a contemporary novelist who combines sharp and sometimes savage social commentary with the classic, full-blooded pleasures novels are supposed to give readers as well as Jonathan Coe does, I must have missed him. Coe's fourth novel, the 1994 "What a Carve Up!" (published in the U.S. as "The Winshaw Legacy"), was a big, Dickensian tale of a young writer who has withdrawn into a benumbed, hermetic existence, hired to write the biography of a family of British monsters who represent the ethic of the Thatcher years. In the great tradition of Dickens' villains, the Winshaws are obscenely alive. Thatcher's ruthless social engineering is summed up by one Winshaw, announcing his plans to scrap free school meals. He writes to a cohort that the benefit is not only saving money but that "a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but chocolate and crisps every day. Which means, in the end, that they'll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower ... As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy." The novel ends in a revenge fantasy so extreme and bloody that you don't know whether to feel exhilarated or appalled.

In Coe's new novel, "The Rotters' Club" (the first half of which will essentially be one large novel -- he is currently writing the second half, "The Closed Circle"), the author turns to the '70s, particularly the political and social morass that paralyzed Britain and also gave birth to punk. Following a group of teenage students, Coe's contemporaries, the novel is both a vivid social portrait and a remembrance of his own adolescent discoveries (though not a nostalgic one). Some of the characters, young Thatcherites in the making, echo the characters in "The Winshaw Legacy" and the novel that followed, "The House of Sleep." They are far too varied a lot to be classified by any one ideology, though. Combined with the adolescent thrill of discovery is the slight chill of maturing, the sense of separating from the people and passions you once thought were an inseparable part of you.

What it shares with its predecessors is Coe's belief in what he calls "pleasuring the reader." He provides multiple plots, a great belief in how accident and coincidence determine fate and the joy of losing yourself in a story. As well as writing "The Closed Circle," Coe is working on a biography of B.S. Johnson, a now forgotten English novelist who committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 40 and who he cites as a huge influence. Coe spoke to me from his home in London.

In the States, we've gone through a few phases with the '70s, from revilement to retro chic. What was it that made you want to write about the decade?

Well, yeah, we've been through both of those phases. I don't know if England lags behind the States or is ahead of the States. We've finished with the '70s retro chic revival, we've done the '80s retro-chic revival and on to the '90s. So things like that move far too fast for a mere novelist to be able to keep up with them. Well, mainly it's because I'm not a writer who's comfortable with writing about periods that I can't remember firsthand. And I wanted to go back in time because I wanted ["The Rotters' Club"] to be a novel about how adolescence works out when you get into early middle age, which determined the time frame from the characters being about 12 or 13 to start with, and ended up with, at the end of the second book, [them being] in their early 40s. And so that kind of by necessity landed me back in the '70s because it's the earliest period I can remember vividly. I have only very hazy memories of the 1960s. So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in one's life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever. But, having said that, it is a decade I'm fascinated by and have complicated feelings about. Because it was when I was an adolescent experiencing all those sort of exciting discoveries you do at that age, and at the same time, politically, it was a stagnant, confrontational decade in Britain. And there was a lot of unrest going on, in the immigration sphere, and the industrial sphere, both of which I glance at in the book. So once I'd got all that personal and wider material in front of me, I realized I had quite a range of moods, quite an explosive mixture to put together.

The only other places I've encountered descriptions of the English political and social morass of the '70s -- the strikes and power cuts and so on -- are in accounts of the origins of punk.

Nonfiction accounts?

Yes. Particularly the essays of Greil Marcus and Jon Savage's book "England's Dreaming."

Next page: "I suppose pleasuring the reader has been very high on my list of priorities"