The Rotters' Club - Softcover

Coe,Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241967767 ISBN 13: 9780241967768

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

Rotters Club

About this title

Review

At a time when people are looking back on the 1970s with nostalgia, Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club is a timely reminder of how ghastly that benighted decade was in Britain. Set in the "industrial" heartland of the West Midlands, it chronicles the growing pains of four Brummie schoolboys--Philip, Sean, Doug, and Benjamin--who must come to terms not only with the normal pangs of adolescence but with terrible knitwear, ludicrous pop music, nightmarish food, and insidious racism, all set against the awful, surreal, and tragicomic reality of a postimperial nation.

The book suffers in its programmatic attempts to make the four boys and their families symbolize, or represent, something important to do with British life. Doug, for instance, symbolizes Industrial Decline--his dad is a shop steward at the doomed British Leyland Longbridge plant. Sean symbolizes Sexual Liberation--at least he's the one who seems most likely to get his rocks off. And young Ben Trotter would appear to represent A Young Jonathan Coe. But if this aspect of the novel seems contrived, then the author's capricious, deft, wryly comedic, and touchingly empathetic style keeps things chugging along, as he knits together the troubles and tragedies of some fairly ordinary people living through fairly extraordinary years. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk

From the Back Cover

"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."
--Charles Taylor, Salon.com

"Even those of us who didn't come of age in 1970s Birmingham will hear echoes of our own youth--the pangs of embarrassment, the anguish of uncertainty, the awkwardness of success [are] vividly present here."
--Mike Francis, The Oregonian

"Momentous--it so roundly depicts the inner trials of its characters and so convincingly recreates their world that it is hard not to read it all the way through at a single sitting...Both reflective and compelling, satirical and tender, wildly imaginative and painstakingly realistic.”
--Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World

"With his hyper-lucid prose and eye for the whimsical, the absurd and the quintessentially human, Jonathan Coe is Britain's best contemporary fictional chronicler."
--Will Self

“Please, God . . . if there’s a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe. The Rotters’ Club offers a thick slice of seventies Birmingham—sharp, acerbic, and menacingly true; a sad, funny, thoroughly engaging look at compromise, complicity, and change in a decade many of us would choose to forget. I want more. Now.”
—-Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour

“Jonathan Coe is the most exciting young British novelist writing today, and The Rotters’ Club is yet another in an unbroken string of entrancing achievements.”
—-Bret Easton Ellis

"A must-read for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.”
—-Katie Owen, The Telegraph

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241967767
• ISBN 13: 9780241967768
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416