In Jonathan Franzen’s painfully public confessions about his approaches to the novel, he concludes that there are writers who are difficult-for-difficulty’s-sake and those who are generously reader-friendly. It’s a slightly new take on the old subject of art vs. commerce, but that’s not what got me thinking about Literary Self-Conscious Man #2. Jonathan Coe falls cleanly and easily into the generous writer category, and that can be both good and bad. His prose is easily accessible, his characters are instantly recognizable and his storylines are aggressively forward-moving. What he aims for, however, is something grander, and on that larger scale he fails, at least in his newest novel, The Closed Circle, which is the sequel to his successful look at Britain in the 1970’s, The Rotter’s Club.

Coe moves his characters ahead some 25 years, and who doesn’t want to see where they’ve ended up, especially when they’re around your age and you can root for lots of failure to make you feel better about yourself. Part of what made the Rotter’s Club so fun was the nostalgic touches, but bringing those characters up to date and trying to place their personal lives against the larger backdrop of 9/11 and the Iraq war is a challenge that Coe isn’t quite up to. He wants to show how politics affects individual lives by making characters victims, either directly or indirectly, of political choices. Tony Blair’s Labor Party moves to the right and cozies up to business interests, and we watch as characters’ jobs get downsized and communities are devastated. The IRA plants a bomb in a restaurant and a character we’ve grown to like gets blown up. Waves of National Front violence against immigrant populations lead to violence against an endearing minority character. And on it goes. It is all very contrived and very telegraphed, and if Coe wasn’t good at delivering people, it would read like nothing more than set pieces easily dismissed.

So the novel moves along easily and without any obvious annoyances, but things get wrapped up far too tidily with coincidence after coincidence that allows too many people to get what they want in a novel that wants to paint a very bleak picture of the modern world. It’s as if he bailed out at the end and disconnected the personal from the political to allow his characters to have happy endings in spite of the nuclear holocaust to come. Look, I’ve read four Coe books and enjoyed three of them, so let me recommend in this order: What a Carve Up! is hilarious satire, The Rotters Club is The Ice Storm UK Lite, The Closed Circle is the above, and The House of Sleep is horrible. He’s a good writer and not a great one, but he’s a comfortable companion to help you block out those voices.