By Jonathan Coe
Penguin Viking £20
Sometime in the early 1990s, Jonathan Coe decided he had had enough of trying to be the next B S Johnson - this country's great under-acknowledged experimental novelist, on whom Coe is something of an expert.
Instead, he wrote , an angry state-of-the-nation novel that dealt with the horrible behaviour of the Winshaw family, Thatcherite grotesques with a guilty secret in the past. The reviewer for the (me) said that while the prose ‘runs on rails’ - ie is not exactly inventive -
