Rise of a Scoundrel
Jonathan Coe's new novel, The Closed Circle, is an immensely satisfying sequel to The Rotter's Club (2001). That book -- frequently funny, occasionally harrowing -- followed a group of anxious teenagers in Birmingham, England, through the 1970s. The world around them was torn by labor strikes, race riots and acts of terrorism, but those calamities could only occasionally break through their real worries: forgetting a bathing suit, passing a physics exam or getting a pretty girl into bed.</br></br>The Closed Circle picks up more than 20 years later, on the eve of the new millennium, when these friends and the world are all grown up. They dress better, listen to more sophisticated music and feel more concerned about wrinkles than acne, but they're still anxious, still worried about making the grade, still trying to figure out with whom they should sleep. Most of them have no better idea of who they are than they did in high school, but now they're afflicted with an aching sense of nostalgia, too. "There were some feelings that never faded," one of them realizes, "no matter how many years intervened, no matter how many friendships and marriages and relationships came and went in between."</br></br>This is, in many ways, a book about the function of nostalgia, about what's remembered and misremembered, which makes it a particularly easy sequel to enter. The characters constantly remind each other (and us) of events from their past, and at the back is a brief summary of The Rotter's Club "for those who have not read it, or who perhaps -- having read it -- have inexplicably forgotten it."</br></br>Coe is a witty writer with a talent for social satire that singes characters without burning away their humanity. He's particularly interested in the way people manage their personal lives in relation to the political climate, and so the plot of The Closed Circle constantly runs beyond its fictional edges into the pages of contemporary history. Too many novelists avoid this kind of topicality, as though they're creating sitcoms and desperate to avoid dating themselves in syndication. But Coe writes his characters right up to the moment, providing critical commentary -- on globalization and the war in Iraq, for instance -- that sounds almost as current as this week's op-ed pages.</br></br>The novel opens with Claire Newman's return home after six years in Italy and a failed relationship that makes her feel as if she's made no progress in her life at all. The time away has also given her a fresh perspective on Birmingham, and it's not reassuring: "My first impression," she writes to her dead sister in a long-running journal, "is that there are vast numbers of people who don't work in this city any more, in the sense of making things or selling things. All that seems to be considered rather old-fashioned. Instead, people meet, and they talk. And when they're not meeting or talking in person, they're usually talking on their phones, and what they're usually talking about is an arrangement to meet." What's more alarming to her, though, is the mental climate: "Underneath is something else altogether -- a terrible, seething frustration."