The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

Max, the sad-sack protagonist of British writer Jonathan Coe's The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, is diagnosed with clinical depression after his wife Caroline leaves him, taking their daughter, Lucy. On a six-month leave from his job, Max agrees to take part in a promotional stunt for a new toothbrush, providing him with a company car and, as he sees it, an opportunity to return to his old haunts, the better to track down the source of what's gone wrong in his life. Banal premise aside, the real problem here is that Max is a bit of a bore, intentionally so, and try as Coe might to play this up for laughs and thereby comment on alienation, loneliness, and the failure to communicate despite various types of social media, Max remains a bore, and an obvious one at that. The pacing is mercifully brisk and Coe pulls off some occasionally affecting scenes, but the story is stale and the humor dull. Max is made to suffer through cruelties and humiliations at the hands of nearly everyone he comes into contact with before experiencing his mandatory moment of reckoning. Yet rather than winding up, Coe inexplicably seals Max's fate with a final authorial gesture that feels stunningly amateurish for a writer of Coe's considerable talents. Terribly disappointing, Terrible Privacy is a misguided failure.