The loneliness of the long distance salesman

If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel.

If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel. Maxwell Sim cannot connect at all. A depressed salesman approaching 50, he is adrift from his father, who moved to Australia 20 years ago, from his wife, an aspiring writer who left him to live in the Lake District, and from his daughter, who hardly speaks to him. He has 70 Facebook ‘friends’, but they are of course not real friends. Worst of all, he cannot connect with — or even like — himself, a failing pointed out by his wife before her departure. Unsurprisingly, he feels low, but we know that he will soon feel even lower: the novel opens with a newspaper article, set a few days in the future, concerning Max’s discovery in a car in Aberdeenshire, drunk, naked and hypothermic, with the boot tragicomically stuffed with 400 toothbrushes and a bin-liner full of postcards.

The questions, then, are how and why Max ends up in that absurd situation, and whether he will recover. The answer to the first question is that Max accepts an offer from his only friend, Trevor, to undertake some freelance work. His task is to travel to the Shetlands and deliver some toothbrushes, and to video-record his progress on the way: the trip, one of four being under- taken to the furthest edges of Britain, is a PR stunt by Trevor’s employer aimed at proving that its products ‘reach furthest’. Max drives off, planning to visit his father’s old flat in Lichfield and his estranged wife and daughter in Cumbria en route; these diversions, and another originally unplanned one, bring more trouble than Max had imagined.