MIDDLE ENGLAND

Benjamin Trotter, friends, and family return (The Closed Circle, 2005, etc.) to observe, mostly with dismay, the run-up to Brexit in a divided Britain.

In April 2010, just after the funeral of his mother, Benjamin listens impassively for what is obviously not the first time as his father, Colin, rails about “political correctness” ruining everything once great about Britain. Ugly though usually veiled comments by others make it clear that those words are used to denigrate anything that acknowledges England is no longer an all-white, all-Christian nation; immigrants and people of color make easy scapegoats in the anxious years after the economic meltdown. As the narrative moves toward the Brexit vote in 2016, Coe, with his usual acuity, tells the story of a collective meltdown through its impact on individuals. Benjamin’s journalist friend, Doug, spars with vacuous Tory flak Nigel as David Cameron’s government blunders toward the referendum it thinks it can manipulate to its own ends. Benjamin’s niece, Sophie, an art historian, finds her new marriage to sweet, totally unintellectual Ian strained when the promotion he’d counted on goes to a nonwhite colleague and he starts listening to his genteelly racist mother, Helena. Helena is hardly worse than Doug’s daughter, Coriander, a nihilistic teen who incarnates every cliché about sanctimonious ultra-leftists. Coe’s marvelous humor is still in evidence, but it’s got a decided edge: There's a cruise on which elderly passengers keep dying, inept middle-aged sex, and a bemused friend’s suggestion, when confronted with Benjamin’s decades-in-the-making mess of a novel, “Have you ever thought of taking up teaching?” Actually, a very slimmed-down version gets Benjamin longlisted for the Booker Prize, one of the semioptimistic touches (he loses) that include Nigel’s experiencing something almost like an attack of honesty post-Brexit and Benjamin’s sister Lois’ finally overcoming her PTSD from a 1974 Irish Republican Army bombing—because things are so much worse now. Coe’s empathy for even the most flawed people and a bedrock, albeit eroding, faith in human decency keep his text from being bitter, but it is deeply sad.

Sharply observed, bitingly witty yet emotionally generous, and as ominous as the times deserve.