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Jonathan Coe

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim Hardcover – Deckle Edge, March 8, 2011

by Jonathan Coe (Author)

181 ratings

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Maxwell Sim can’t seem to make a single meaningful connection. His absent father was always more interested in poetry; he maintains an e-mail correspondence with his estranged wife, though under a false identity; his incomprehensible teenage daughter prefers her BlackBerry to his conversation; and his best friend since childhood is refusing to return his calls. He has seventy-four friends on Facebook, but nobody to talk to.

In an attempt to stir himself out of this horrible rut, Max quits his job as a customer liaison at the local department store and accepts a strange business proposition that falls in his lap by chance: he’s hired to drive a Prius full of toothbrushes to the remote Shetland Islands, part of a misguided promotional campaign for a dental-hygiene company intent on illustrating the slogan “We Reach Furthest.”

But Max’s trip doesn’t go as planned, as he’s unable to resist making a series of impromptu visits to important figures from his past who live en route. After a string of cruelly enlightening and intensely awkward misadventures, he finds himself falling in love with the soothing voice of his GPS system (“Emma”) and obsessively identifying with a sailor who perpetrated a notorious hoax and subsequently lost his mind. Eventually Max begins to wonder if perhaps it’s a severe lack of self-knowledge that’s hampering his ability to form actual relationships.

A humane satire and modern-day picaresque, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a gently comic and rollickingly entertaining novel about the paradoxical difficulties of making genuine attachments in a world of advanced communications technology and rampant social networking.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

March 8, 2011
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0307594815
ISBN-13

978-0307594815
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Jonathan Coe
1,401
Paperback
31 offers from $5.98

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coe (The Rotters' Club) broadly satirizes the disconnectedness of modern life with the story of Maxwell Sim, who has 70 Facebook friends but no one he can turn to when his wife and daughter leave him. After a trip to Australia to reconnect with his estranged father leads nowhere, Trevor, one of Max's few real friends, offers him an unusual gig: drive a Prius to the northernmost tip of the British Isles as part of a promotion for a startup eco-toothbrush company. Max takes a meandering route that allows him to visit his ex-wife, check in on his father's long-empty apartment, and pay a visit to the parents of his childhood friends. He also develops a romantic fixation on the voice coming from his GPS, which he names Emma. True connection is elusive: Max gains insight to his marriage, but only after using a fake identity to befriend his ex-wife online; haunting incidents from his teenage years come into focus belatedly, and the clarity he finally achieves comes at the prompting of a stranger. Coe has a lot of fun skewering the way technology and social media have become buttresses of society, but the antic plot and unfortunately precious conclusion water down the thoughtful points. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

“[A] witty, sympathetic, and often painfully funny take on real loneliness in the virtual, socially networked world.” —Library Journal

“Coe’s voice, spoken through Max’s perspective, effuses the novel with an easy, understated and satirical sense of humor that is a joy to read . . . An excellent and entertaining take on how our countless methods of modern communication are making it harder to truly connect.” —Katie Stroh, The Daily Texan

“[A] beguiling combination of picaresque comic adventure, meditation on the idea of meta-narrative, and thought-provoking reflection on the place of social media in our lives.” —Heather Paulson, Booklist

“Funny, acerbic and, most of all, a novel that could not have been born at any other time than the present.” —“What We’re Reading Now,” NPR

“A smart satire of materialism and modern life . . . Coe is a funny writer, and it's a testament to his skill with character that for all of his hero’s maddening faults and failures, Sim never wears out his welcome . . . Much like its targets, the book stubbornly delivers moments of humor and humanity.” —Chris Barton, Los Angeles Times

“Touching and admirable . . . Coe masterfully equips [his] vibrant and ingenious novels . . . with trap-like ironies that snap shut on his characters without bending them out of shape.” —Mark Martin, Barnes and Noble Review

“Beguiling . . . Coe has devised a powerful structure upon which to hang his exacting sense of humor and acute social observations, [and he] leaves the reader uncomfortably engaged with the consequences of Max’s terrible privacy, an unbearable loneliness that I would wager many of us share in this globalized world of greater and greater connectedness in which we are anything but connected.” —Martha McPhee, San Francisco Chronicle

“Coe’s ninth novel cleverly plays with the reclusive-in-plain-sight notion and pokes gentle fun at our society’s love affair with modern gadgetry. It is a compelling, poignant read.” —Sara Vilkomerson, Entertainment Weekly

“On the one hand, [Coe’s] novels are immensely pleasurable in traditional ways: rich in characterization, emotionally resonant, thoughtfully plotted. On the other, he’s committed to unorthodox, even daring formal conceits, which energize his books by shaking them out of any possible complacency . . . Coe manages all that while also being very, very funny. There are many contemporary writers who can make you laugh, but Coe is one of the few whose comic set pieces do that and feel like miniature works of art. He has a genius for perfectly constructed jokes with hilarious payoffs.” —Ed Park, Bookforum

“In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time.” —Yorkshire Evening Post

“Clever, engaging, and spring-loaded with mysteries and surprises.” —Caroline McGinn, Time Out

“A brilliant depiction of 21st century life [and] a truly magnificent novel…Coe manages to make me howl with laughter and sob with tenderness within the same sentence.” —Patrick Neate, The Bookseller

“Classic Coe.” —Vogue

“[Coe] gives us witty and tender humanity, and reminds us that while the winners write the history, it is life’s losers who have the best stories.” —Simon Baker, The Spectator

“An amiably lunatic journey into the unknown…Coe’s satirical eye is as dependable as ever.” —Financial Times

“Most entertaining…A parable about the feeling many now have of not being in control of their own story.” —The Independent

“Cunningly plotted, extremely well-written and very, very funny.” —The Telegraph

“Exceptionally moving…[it tells] us something about loneliness, failure and the inability to cope that we haven’t quite read before.” —The Guardian

“Masterly…[Coe’s] eye for the details of contemporary life remains as sharp as ever.”—Daily Mail

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; American First edition (March 8, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307594815
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307594815
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.75 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,873,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #14,034 in Fiction Satire
- #25,419 in Humorous Fiction
- #111,571 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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181 ratings

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Jonathan Coe

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Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters' Club, The Rain Before It Falls and Number 11.

He has won many literary prizes at home and abroad, and his biography of the writer BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, won the Samuel Johnson Prize. Feature films have been made of his novels The Dwarves of Death (as Five Seconds To Spare) and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (as La vie très privée de Monsieur Sim). The Rotters' Club was adapted for BBC television in 2005, starring Sarah Lancashire, Alice Eve and Kevin Doyle.

In 2017 he published a novella for children, The Broken Mirror.

Hie latest novel, MIDDLE ENGLAND, published by Penguin in November 2018, reintroduces characters from The Rotters' Club and puts them against a background of real events in the UK before and after the Brexit referendum.

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Acorn

Excellent up to the penultimate chapter

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2013

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Maxwell Sim is forty-eight, an only child and a lonely man. His mother died years ago, his introspective and distant father went off to Australia, and six months ago his wife Caroline and daughter Lucy upped and left. Since Catherine's departure he has been severely depressed and unable to work. When things look bleakest, an old friend offers Maxwell an opportunity at a toothbrush manufacturing company. All he has to do is drive to the Shetland Islands, do some filming and get publicity for a new line of products. It should be the start of a recovery, but for Maxwell Sim it is the beginning of a descent into a private purgatory.

Caroline bought Maxwell a ticket to Australia so that he could attempt some reconciliation with his father. It didn't go well, but the sight of a Chinese woman and her daughter in a restaurant, and the intimacy of their company, inspires him. He returns to England and on the way meets a young woman named Poppy who is kind, even if he doesn't realise that at the time.

Through Poppy, Maxwell becomes familiar with the story of Donald Crowhurst, a man who tried to fake a round-the-world sailing trip, went mad, then disappeared at sea. As Maxwell heads off for the Shetlands, he increasingly sees his trip as a reflection of, and then indistinguishable from, the voyage of Crowhurst.

On his journey he visits Caroline, now more attractive and happy in her new life. He has an unsatisfactory dinner with Lucy, collects a folder of poems and a short story from his father's flat near Birmingham and looks up an old school friend in Edinburgh. These meetings, and the reading that he does along the way, radically re-write the history of his childhood and the relationship of his parents, and eventually bring him face to face with some cold, ugly truths about his own character.

There are some deliciously comic moments in this novel, some that come up on you by stealth, some based on coincidence, and others simply knockabout. Coe manages Maxwell's descent into madness with a sure hand. Indeed, at times I could sense Coe enjoying himself as he was banging out the words. Maxwell Sim is a very sad character, but one for whom we cannot help but have a deep sympathy.

There is also some biting social criticism - a common element in Coe's work. Often in passing detail or oblique comment, the lunacy of modern Britain is exposed. It is a country dominated by snake oil salesmen in business, politics and culture. An old woman who lives opposite Maxwell's father's flat is driven to tears by the degradation she sees around her. Old values of craftsmanship, sociability, community and self-respect have been corrupted by money and greed, but at the same time the lowest common denominator proves far too seductive. Maxwell himself cannot live without shopping malls, soulless franchises and fast food on the motorway services.

Jonathan Coe is a fine satirist and a trenchant critic of contemporary life. He has a keen ear for the drivel that passes as conversation in modern society and a sharp eye for the bleakness of the rich societies in which we live.

However, the final chapter of this book sparked two contradictory sets of emotions. On the one hand I was disappointed at the crudely engineered ending that uses the device of the author intervening in the story. It's a tired old trick, and it was ironic to find it in this novel given that I had previously compared Philip Hensher unfavourably with Jonathan Coe partly because Hensher employed the same technique. After a great and giddy ride on Maxwell's journey, the final chapter gave the impression that Coe had run out of steam and out of ideas in terms of the plot. I would love to think that he was being playful and giving the reader a cheap and tawdry ending as a final comment on modern life, but if I am being honest with myself, that just won't wash.

On the other hand, the sketches of ideas in the final chapter provide a fascinating insight into the creative process. The chapter reinforces the idea that creativity is not so much inventing something totally new, but rather taking the strands from the world around you and weaving them together in a way that is very different to what has gone before. It is the stuff of paradigm shifts in science and technology as much as the foundation of great works of art.

So what to do? If you just want to read a great novel, don't read the final chapter. If you enjoy stories and are inured to disappointment in life, continue on. And if you want to ponder the mechanics of creativity as well as read a great novel, leave the final chapter and read it a few months down the track. It will be rewarding in its own right.

5 people found this helpful

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Barbara Klein

Privacy is the subject

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 21, 2011

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The reader will miss the delightful playfulness of this novel if it is read solely as one individual's breakthrough to a deeper understanding of himself, although it is that. Jonathon Coe's best novels do not focus so much on private lives as on the social context that shapes them. One of his acute observations about that context is how swiftly it changes from one generation to the next. Imagine now that you have an appointment to meet a friend, a very significant, emotionally charged appointment. You go to the appointed place, but the friend does not show. What would you do? Well, of course, you would send him a text. "Where RU?" Everything would become clear in an instant. In case you did not immediately think of that, the cover of Coe's novel jogs your memory by encasing its information in bubbles similar to those that carry text messages on an iPhone.

In this age of the Internet, privacy has become one of those topics subject to endless commentary and hand-wringing examination. Max has picked up on this contemporary thread. He comments that he had read somewhere that there are always about five pairs of eyes keeping him under constant surveillance. We have lost the kind of privacy that lured Donald Crowhurst to madness and death. But is that a bad thing?

There is in the novel a sense of nostalgia for a time when communications between individuals required pen and ink, when delivery of news might take several weeks, might arrive too late, in fact, to be useful. Coe is interested in that nostalgia, but he is not nostalgic. His fiction exposes the fallacy of his characters' belief in some former merry old England with quaint pubs serving shepherd's pie. As Max observes when he begins his journey, he is old enough to remember what service stations along the highway used to be like with horrible, cheap plastic tables and unspeakable food. Some things actually improve. Miss Erith's angry mourning over some version of England she claimed to have known is clearly error, a fantasy based on tourist brochures.

In presenting the story of Max and his terrible loneliness, Coe is playing with ideas of privacy and particularly the fear of an invasion of that privacy which have become important in contemporary society. One of the main targets of unfavorable comment when the subject of privacy arises is the ubiquitous presence of Facebook. But surely everyone gets the joke when Max returns from Australia and logs on to Facebook hoping to find messages from his 70 Facebook friends that had been posted in his absence. There is no such thing as being absent from Facebook. That is the whole point. If Max wanted someone to write on his wall, he had to post something for them to write about. "Here's my Dad and me having a drink at Sydney harbor. He's a dour old sod." Max's hurt feelings when he finds no messages for him on Facebook is funny in a very Jonathan Coe kind of way. Facebook is one of the many contemporary social constructions that Max just does not understand. The episode involving Max's friendship with his wife as Liz Hammond is a wonderfully complex investigation of all kinds of issues involving privacy and the invasion of it.

I think the Donald Crowhurst story and then the story of Max's father and his dreadful isolation show the down side of privacy. People suffer in their self-enforced seclusion. Max's discovery of his father's secret, his violation of that privacy, allowed him to begin a friendship. And when he discovers his own secret, he is able to reach across the globe in an instant to make human contact. That is a good thing.

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Jackie H

Stop reading at the next-to-last chapter

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 16, 2017

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This was a very interesting and intriguing book with the exception of the ending. I should have stopped reading at the point where it said "stop reading..."! As with other reviewers, I found the last chapter quite disappointing but it was an insight into the writing process. I think we were all aware of such a process so using it as an actual ending was rather pedantic and uninspiring.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 29, 2011

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Jonathan Coe is one of my favorite authors. I consider "The Rotters' Club" and "The Closed Circle" to be easily in my top 20 favorite books of all time. Coe has a knack for writing thoughtful and clever novels with plenty of black humor and relevant societal commentary. I found "The Rain Before it Falls" a disappointment although I did enjoy Coe's bio of B.S. Johnson ("Like a Fiery Elephant"). "The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim" isn't quite up to the lofty standard of the Rotters' books, but it is certainly on par with "The House of Sleep" and "The Winshaw Legacy". In short: a very worthy read.

"The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim" is essentially about the importance of love and relationships. Sim is on a quest to determine what "a real relationship between two human beings should be, at a time when people seemed to be losing the ability to connect with one another, even as technology created more and more ways in which it out to be possible". Coe uses the ill-fated sailing trip of Donald Crowhurst as more than a metaphor/pre-cursor to Sim's on quest for meaning as Sim embarks on a solo trip to the remote northern UK to peddle toothbrushes. "The Terrible Privacy" is loneliness and Sim's quest to eliminate this privacy is told with great care and humor by Coe. Very highly recommended.

One person found this helpful

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Gabriel Silveira

Not one of Coe's best works.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 4, 2013

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I'm a huge fan of Coe's first books, but lately they've been kinda... meh. I'd give one more star if not for the last chapter.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Eileen Shaw

I say pannini you say pannino

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 8, 2015

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Maxwell Sim may be the least prepossessing hero of a book you will ever meet. His marriage has failed and his wife and daughter have removed themselves from the family home. He is on his way to visit his father in Australia when he meets Poppy, who lets him into the secret that she works as an Adultery Facilitator. She records the background of various habitats to be played by those who wish to suggest that they are in one place, when actually they are in another. I know – it can’t quite be credited that someone might make a living from the cruel deceits of adulterers, but there we are.

There are several wonderful things in this novel, including the story of Donald Crowhurst whose very sad story most literature lovers will have have heard, and aspects of his story chime in with the events of the novel. Max’s failures are in miniature, Crowhurst’s. He’s been hired to sell toothbrushes. There are some doldrums for Maxwell, but some high points too. The novel dwells a little too long on the dreary thoughts of Maxwell Sim, but cling on if you can.

It does pick up a bit when we get him in his Prius Car, on the way to the Shetlands as part of a competitive drive-along, with a £500 bonus for who can make the most sales. But Maxwell has other things on his mind. He makes a disastrous visit along the way to an ex-girlfriend and ends up somewhere in the Trussochs, naked and frostbitten in the back of his car.

It is only when he remembers the hundreds of postcards he’s been sent by a friend of the family that he discovers his own true nature.
This book is, at times, almost terminally depressing, but ends on a jokey kind of high note that quite cheered me up.

3 people found this helpful

Joost Kiefte

A riches of embarrassment.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 31, 2015

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I have little to add to the other reviews at this stage, save that I too thought the ending of the book a letdown, albeit a minor one, although the careful reader might have had an intimation of how it was going to work out: the voice of the purported author has been heard in a few places before. (Does Coe have a problem with endings? I thought the endings of The Rotters' Club and of What a Carve Up the weakest parts of the books). Also, the interior monologue-like ramble (something already tried by Coe in The Rotters' Club) on his flight from Australia to Singapore is a bit taxing. No matter, just a few lesser pages shouldn't be allowed to overshadow the rest of the book, which I think is very good. If Maxwell's inertia doesn't make him an entirely likeable character, he's certainly not a bad sort and means well, but the many armpit moistening embarrassments he suffers throughout the book do evoke feelings of visceral pity, and his almost constant failure to take matters in hand made me feel something approaching vicarious shame. The only time he really lets his feelings finally get the better of him (the nettle pit scene) ends in disaster. The faint hope that glimmers towards the end is however cruelly doused by Coe's arty-crafty ending.

One person found this helpful

Fish pie

Readable but ultimately disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 6, 2014

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The issues that this novel tackles in terms of being cut off from intimate relations and the fakery that we employ to make ourselves meet others' expectations are intriguing. However, I have to agree with one of the previous reviewers - this book just isn't in the same league as, say, The Rotters' Club. I sought it out because I have previously loved Coe's works but was disappointed by this one. Possibly I missed the point of this book, but it was very hard to empathise with the self-centred and passive eponymous narrator. There were bits that intrigued - the parallel drawn with the fake exploits of Crowhurst was interesting and held my attention, but for large parts of the book I just wanted the narrator to get on with it and not wallow any longer.
Part of the book is bound up with the narrator's journey to the Shetland Isles with a special delivery of toothbrushes and this felt less than credible - it felt stagey and artificial. Also the visit to his ex-wife and daughter felt cliched with him taking an inappropriate present - too predictable.
The good points of the novel for me were the different views of Maxwell's relationship with his old friend Chris and the way his wife described an incident that happened on holiday. There was a sense of richness and development in these parts that was missing in the rest of the novel which largely felt as flat and unengaging as the motorway that Maxwell drove along on his toothbrush journey.
And I'm afraid that I felt the ending was horribly self-indulgent.
I'm sorry to be so negative - it's possibly because I had high expectations because I really rate Jonathan Coe as an author. If you haven't read him before then I would encourage you to try one of his other novels first!

terri the cook

A modern day Reggie Perrin ??

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 4, 2011

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I suppose the word to describe this book is "curious".
Hardly a 'Rotters Club' or a 'Closed Circle' but quite a lilting and entertaining read.
Coe always has a weak person as his main character but they are usually surrounded by other characters who are interesting in themselves.
These other characters are vitally important to his books.
This time, Maxwell Sim takes centre-stage and the focus is on him alone for the entire book.
It works for most of the time but can be frustrating at other times.
The parallels and coincidences are very clever.
The likeness to the great Reggie Perrin are there (as are the use of the names of Reggie's colleagues)
My advice....don't give up on it. Read it to the end.
This one can easily grow on you.

One person found this helpful

Francophile

Somewhat boring privacy of Maxwell Sim

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 25, 2020

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Early on it’s hard to generate any enthusiasm or sympathy for Maxwell Sim and his bizarre, unfulfilled pilgrimage to The Orkneys to sell toothbrushes. But the story slowly builds and as one has come to expect from Johnathan Coe the big reveals come at the end allowing you belatedly to make sense of the rest of the book!

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