The Rotters' Club [Paperback]

Jonathan Coe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2003

Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

This witty, sprawling and ambitious novel relates the coming-of-age stories of a group of adolescents in Birmingham, England, in the 1970s, with the era itself becoming a kind of character, encompassing trivialities like music as well as more serious issues: labor struggles, racism, terrorism. Of course, the teenagers Benjamin Trotter (a play on his name accounts for the novel's title) and three of his male classmates, along with two female peers, are struggling with their own timeless issues: Why are my parents so weird? Will I ever have sex? Is Eric Clapton God? Coe amusingly and sympathetically articulates the desperate nature of teenage life, demonstrating a sure command of his protagonists' vernacular. He juxtaposes "crises" of adolescence with much more compelling events: a pub bombing by Irish nationalists and drawn-out strikes, for example, and the very real toll they take on people, including some of his characters. But this interweaving also reveals the novel's biggest problem: the combination of these two narrative strands isn't as seamless as it ought to be, nor as illuminating as Coe intends. The book is Dickensian in scope, with multiple plot lines and perspectives as well as miniature portraits of virtually everyone connected with the teens. Unfortunately, the narrative is sometimes hard to follow, and individual characters often remain opaque. The difficulty is compounded by rapidly shifting perspectives and an awkward framing narrative set in the early 2000s. As he demonstrated in his well-received novel about the Thatcher years, The Winshaw Legacy, Coe is immensely clever, but that cleverness is almost misplaced here: universal as it may be, adolescent angst doesn't really compare to the problems of massive social change. (Feb. 26)the second of which will revisit the characters' lives in the 1990s.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375713123
• ISBN-13: 978-0375713125
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #193,948 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich, Engaging, and Hilarious, May 22, 2005

By 

John Sollami (Stamford, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rotters' Club (Hardcover)

I've read two other works by Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up and the House of Sleep, but this novel is the most entertaining and engaging of all. Coe has captured an era of development, not just culturally in the 1970s, but psychologically in his rich characters. There are teenagers painfully growing up, and there are their parents, painfully growing up as well. Invoking the explosive backdrop of seventies IRA violence, labor unrest, and right-wing political and racial nastiness, Coe fashions the lives of his complex characters as they navigate through a troubled timeframe in Birmingham, England. I cared about these people because they were real, they were funny, and they were invested with vulnerable, human, and universal emotions. I can't ask for much more from this author, who is, in my estimation, one of the most underrated and inventive out there. Congratulations! I very much look forward to the promised sequel.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Time To Join The Club, March 10, 2002

By 

Philip Nutman (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rotters' Club (Hardcover)

Englishman Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club is quite simply the most hilarious, laugh-out-loud novel I've read in years.
Not only is this politically-charged coming of age novel a gut-busting, funny-when-you-least-expect-it literary tour-de-force, it's an assured (although ultimately flawed) work displaying a rare élan and maturity seldom found in the works of young contemporary American writers.
Both an elegy to and an excoriation of the sordid "brown" Britain of the 1970s, which starts around the failure of the Edward Heath's Tory government and the attendant nationwide strikes, power blackouts, and general misery experienced by the population, the book moves through the resurgence of the Labour Party and the death of Socialism as marked by Margaret Thatcher's election victory in 1979.
Yes, this is a social history, and despite some critics who've said the book is too politically aware for its own good, it is first and foremost a tale of longing, be it the yearnings of a married, middle-aged man for his young lover, or protagonist Ben Trotter's (called Bent Rotter by his peers) unrequited desire for girlschool drama diva Cicely.
But the political cornerstone of the book definitely contributes to what many readers see as its major failing. Designed as the first volume of a dyad, this volume explores what Coe has called the last decade of real [British] politics, and a planned sequel will follow the principal characters as adults in the late 1990s through the current maze of Blairite socialism. As such, the novel's various threads don't all come together in a unified dénouement, and this open-ended, albeit life-like, conclusion will frustrate some readers.
And yes, the rumors are true: Coe, who's not afraid of experimentation, has indeed written a 15,000 word *sentence* which runs an exhausting 37 pages, and was inspired by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who once wrote a novel which barely contained a full stop.
This is an uneven novel which, due to the specificity of its locale, time period, and cultural references, may confound many American readers (I am an expatriate Englishman of Coe's generation, but being a Londoner, his depiction of 1973 Brum is as familiar yet as foreign as Tony Soprano's New Jersey). But what a novel it is! And what a terrific read (I devoured it in two mammoth sittings in a day).
One way or another, discerning readers will discover a trip to The Rotters' Club rewarding.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hilarious and Heartbreaking Novel, August 11, 2002

By 

Elizabeth Hendry (New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rotters' Club (Hardcover)

Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club is a very amusing, engaging story of four teenage boys and their families and friends in Birmingham, England in the 1970s. Much went on in England, and Birmingham, at the time--strikes, pub bombings--and that affects the story in the novel. But equally important and disastrous are the goings on in the individual families--extramarital affairs, deaths, disappearances. These all happen, yet the boys in the novel manage to have an amusing trip into adulthood. They come of age, despite everything, and manage to do OK. The novel will make you laugh out loud and it will make you think about the sadnesses in life. I really enjoyed this one. Coe is a talented, very funny writer. Enjoy.