Coe - The Closed Circle

Last week I read Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle. I had read his Dwarves of Death many years ago and enjoyed it, so I gave this recent (hardcover - 2004) release a try. In The Closed Circle, Coe does a solid job of combining various character's points of view, writing believably in the inner voice of both male and female characters. He experiments with technique, for example bringing back the epistolary style of writing on several occasions, even modernizing it to include e mail; also, he briefly adopts Joyce's method of writing dialogue, and so on. He is an author brave enough to grant his characters names like 'Malvina', and 'Pusey-Hamilton', which sounds like something from a Bond novel. This is a good book, but a bit soap opera-ish.