The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

January 31, 2011
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.

April 15, 2011

The lonely life of an everyman who might as well be called a nobody is the subject of the popular British author's ninth novel (The Rain Before It Falls, 2008, etc.).

Late-40-ish Max Sim, on leave while "recovering" from depression from his job as a department store's customer liaison officer, is estranged from his disapproving wife, Caroline, and his daughter. Despite an array of computerized and other devices that offer connection to everywhere and everyone, Max seems eternally on the periphery of his own story. In fact, we learn about the experiences and influences that have formed him from the testimony of other people. A girl whom Max admires tells him the (real life) story of Donald Crowhurst, the yachtsman who entered a round-the-globe race and promptly disappeared (Max senses an immediate kinship). Caroline, a writer who despairs over Max's indifference to culture, contributes a mordant fictionalization of a disastrous family vacation. A school essay written by a childhood friend's sister, and a confessional memoir penned by Max's absentee father, a would-be poet living in Australia (whence Max returns from a visit at the novel's outset), complete the array of judgmental perspectives on our antihero's many, many failings. The story's central action is Max's car trip to the Shetland Islands, as a rep delivering a shipment of eco-friendly toothbrushes to a client. It's a ruefully comic plunge into the unknown, during which Max appears to form a relationship with the voice of his car's "satnav" (GPS navigational system); so it goes, in the brave new world of instant communication. It's a risky road for a novel to travel, especially when a postmodernist-metafictional dénouement and ending underscore this book's peculiar challenges to the reader. Still, like the hero of many a BBC-TV comedy, Max carries on, and may, like the cockroach, outlast all the "normal" people who keep their distances from him.

Not for every taste, but a significant building block in Coe's adventurous and distinctive oeuvre.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011

On Valentine's Day 2009, Englishman Maxwell Sim, a man with 70 Facebook friends and few real ones, is in Australia having dinner with his estranged father when he notices a Chinese woman and her daughter at a nearby table. The easy intimacy he perceives between them provokes an epiphany, revealing everything missing from his own life and sending the middle-aged divorce into an emotional tailspin. Back home, he opts not to return to the department store job from which he is on leave owing to depression. Instead, he takes a position selling all-natural toothbrushes and soon embarks on a sales promotion to the far north of England. Alone in a Prius with only the voice of his GPS for company, he finds himself on a journey through his past, visiting people and places he once knew, heading toward an emotional breakdown and, ultimately, to unexpected and redeeming self-knowledge. VERDICT This witty, sympathetic, and often painfully funny take on real loneliness in the virtual, socially networked world deserves a wide audience.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2011
After his wife and daughter leave him without looking back, and he returns from a failed journey to Australia to visit the father he never really knew, Maxwell Sim is presented with an opportunity to bring custom-made toothbrushes to the Shetland Islands in Scotland. With only 70 friends on Facebook and nothing but penis-enlargement e-mails in his inbox, Max decides he has nothing to lose. Thus begins a road trip through the English countryside that includes falling in love with the voice on his GPS, encountering an old high-school flame, and uncovering the mystery of his fathers past life. Although the novel is slow to begin, it quickly grabs the reader with its 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. Coe, whose previous works include The Rotters Club (2002), once again manages to toy with experimental fiction without losing commercial appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)