Items related to The Rotters' Club
"At once uproariously entertaining and deadly serious—a comedy of manners and mores, but also a conscientious and politically charged reminder of an age quite easily forgotten, yet not far removed from our own.”
—Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
The acclaimed author of The Winshaw Legacy—an epic satire of the eighties—now turns to the previous decade, which is to recent history what adolescence is to life itself: awkward, fervent, confused, sweetly naïve, and oh-so-painfully familiar, yet also far less tiresomely ironic than what we’ve come to.
Our principal guides to this collective coming-of-age story are four boys, classmates and friends, who must cope with their own hopes and traumas as well as their country’s, at a time when industrial and uncool Birmingham is on the cutting edge of Britain’s economic crisis and the air is filled with upheaval and change—from class antagonism and Northern Ireland to new music and morals.
As for parents, it goes without saying that they don’t help one little bit. Witnessing marital dissatisfaction lends no assurance to anyone facing the difficulties of holding a band together; of refining one’s creativity, politics, or (god forbid) faith; of surviving classroom rivalries and racism and romance.
Comic, wistful, revisionist, and even romantic, seamlessly adjoining issues both intimately personal and broadly political, “the novel is filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose welfare moves us,” wrote William Sutcliffe in The Independent (U.K.). “This is the simplest, but the highest calling of literature. The Rotters’ Club is a book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends.”
—Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
The acclaimed author of The Winshaw Legacy—an epic satire of the eighties—now turns to the previous decade, which is to recent history what adolescence is to life itself: awkward, fervent, confused, sweetly naïve, and oh-so-painfully familiar, yet also far less tiresomely ironic than what we’ve come to.
Our principal guides to this collective coming-of-age story are four boys, classmates and friends, who must cope with their own hopes and traumas as well as their country’s, at a time when industrial and uncool Birmingham is on the cutting edge of Britain’s economic crisis and the air is filled with upheaval and change—from class antagonism and Northern Ireland to new music and morals.
As for parents, it goes without saying that they don’t help one little bit. Witnessing marital dissatisfaction lends no assurance to anyone facing the difficulties of holding a band together; of refining one’s creativity, politics, or (god forbid) faith; of surviving classroom rivalries and racism and romance.
Comic, wistful, revisionist, and even romantic, seamlessly adjoining issues both intimately personal and broadly political, “the novel is filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose welfare moves us,” wrote William Sutcliffe in The Independent (U.K.). “This is the simplest, but the highest calling of literature. The Rotters’ Club is a book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends.”
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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.
From the Back Cover:
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
"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
--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
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0375413839
- ISBN 13 9780375413834
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages432
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Alfred a Knopf Inc, Westminister, Maryland, U.S.A.
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0375413839
ISBN 13: 9780375413834
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