THE THIRD, PERHAPS final novel in a series that began with The Rotters' Club (which I have read) and continued with The Closed Circle (which I have not), revolving around a group of characters who meet at secondary school in (or near) Birmingham in the mid-1970s. The Rotters Club is set during their school days; this one, although it opens in 2010 and closes in 2018, centers around the Brexit election of 2016.
I first became aware of Coe as the biographer of British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson, so I was expecting him to lean in an experimental direction himself, but no--he's a straight-down-the-middle realist, dealing in relatively familiar kinds of characters and settings in in the spirit of Stendhal's mirror on the roadway, a contemporary Trollope.
What the novel mainly registers is the bitter, burnt-air atmosphere of politically-inspired hostility rupturing work relationships, family relationships, even interactions with strangers--which is to say, as an American reader, that it is both revealing and all too recognizable.
For most of my life, it seems to me, Great Britain and the USA have been dancing the same dances at roughly the same time, politically. We had LBJ and the Great Society, they had Harold Wilson. They had Thatcher, we had Reagan. We had our "Third Way" moment in Bill Clinton, they had theirs with Tony Blair. They had Brexit; we had Trump.
I'd be interested in a novel that tries to do for the USA from 2010 to 2018 what Coe does here for the UK, but does anyone have any ambition to do the big-picture Dos Passos thing any longer?
Franzen, maybe? But apparently his new one is set fifty years ago.
Updike would have been up for it. Or Tom Wolfe.
Oy, high on the list of things I would not want to read: Tom Wolfe's novel about the Trump era.
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