You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal, who can think,

who can reason, who can read. Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt.

Today my guest is Jonathan Coe.

We are at Downing College under the auspices of the English Council.

They are the proprietors of a seminar that is held yearly on the contemporary British writer. And the sound, which you

will hear, is not studio sound. We are in a dormitory at the college talking about his books.

Jonathan Coe's books include The Windshaw Legacy, which was published in America by Knapp. He has written

the novel, The House of Sleep, which Knappf will publish as well. Now, one of the things that I notice

is that while contemporary British fiction has a consistent ironic tone, its obligation remains to a kind of

domestic naturalism that at least by inclination, your books seem to subvert. And I applaud

that subversion. Could we talk about that at first the extent that a comic novel now

is more a wild novel, that it seems to go beyond the genial comedy, say, of Jane Austen or

P.G. Woodhouse, to something that wants to disrupt.

Yeah.

Well, there's always been a tension in my writing and I think,

and in my reading between the kind of high seriousness of certain writers

who are the kind of strongest in my pantheon.

And also the kind of low comedy that I enjoy just as a reader.

So, whereas on the one hand,

among my favorite writers are people like Thomas Mann and Robert Mewtel,

who could hardly be graver, really,

in the way that they write and the kind of concerns that they address.

...