LIT REVIEW: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe

In The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, author Jonathan Coe manages to create a traditional questing tale out of modern-day materials.

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LIT REVIEW: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe

POSTED: Thursday, May 26, 2011, 10:00 AM

“What do you think is the best kind of story, Max?” asks his colleague in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. “The quest. The journey. The voyage of discovery,” she tells him. In the novel, author Jonathan Coe manages to create a traditional questing tale out of modern-day materials: a trip from England to Scotland in a Prius becomes a journey of self-discovery for Max, a series of encounters that range from tragic to hilarious. Set in 2009, it’s a novel about an inability to communicate despite — or perhaps because of — modern technology’s many attempts to make communication easier, from Facebook to texting.

At the start of the novel, Max is on medical leave from his job after suffering from depression. His wife and child have left him, he’s just had a difficult experience visiting the father with whom he could never connect, and he’s beginning to feel a “terrible privacy” setting in, an all-consuming loneliness. Just then, however, he is offered a job as a traveling toothbrush salesman — work which requires him to, like the toothbrushes he sells, “reach furthest.” That means selling his wares in the far north of Britain.

But he gets a bit sidetracked: Max stops in to see the parents of an old friend; he drops by his father’s former apartment, now disused; he visits a woman who was once nearly his lover. But he struggles for a meaningful connection with any of these people — partially because of his own tentativeness, but also because technology designed to ease communication makes it easy to seal ourselves off from the world, eliminating the need for actual physical contact. Despite his cell phone, a special company headset, a camcorder and the many security cameras trained on him throughout Britain — a country where you’re taped everywhere you go — Max experiences such isolation that his most intimate friend becomes his car’s talking GPS, which he names Emma.

Early in the novel, Max learns of a 1960s figure, Donald Crowhurst, who was expected to sail solo around the world but instead attempted to fake his trip. After setting off, he never completed his journey, instead recording false data about his journey as he sat in his boat at sea. With only a half-working radio to connect him to the outside world, Crowhurst goes mad with isolation—something that would seem impossible in our linked-in modern life, where connection seems inescapable. But Max finds that even with all the latest technology to hand, he’s still very much alone.

Despite its rather depressing themes, Coe’s novel retains a fairly light tone throughout. As a narrator, Max is likeable, even if, as his ex-wife points out, he doesn’t like himself. He’s quite funny at times, talking directly to the reader: “Did you like how, when I was describing the sexy bits, I started every sentence with ‘I forget’? That’s good writing, that is. It took me quite a while to come up with that idea,” he informs us. The reader quickly becomes caught up in his world, rooting for him and cringing through one social disaster after another.

Max’s story isn’t a subtle one. The themes are made fairly explicit, and sometimes the narrator hits you over the head with them. But that’s easy to forgive, because it’s entirely in keeping with Max’s character: he’s unendingly earnest, and as he reminds us, he’s not a trained writer.

Jonathan Coe, however, is, and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim achieves its unpretentious aims: It’s a good story making good points, even if it may not stay with you long.

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