Jonathan Coe is the author of seven original and entertaining novels that combine an interest in postmodernist fiction-he calls his first novel pastiche Samuel Beckett-with the narrative urgencies of the best popular movies and fiction. Coe's most successful novel, What a Carve Up! (1994), uses the pattern of British horror comedy to introduce the "monsters" of the Margaret Thatcher and John Major era in British politics. He has worked as a proofreader and as a semiprofessional musician, claiming in a 1997 interview with Andrew Biswell that the acceptance of his first novel frustrated his real ambition to "move to London and become Frank Zappa"; and he has written books about American cinema icons Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. Though he has two graduate degrees in English, he insists that his academic studies, which he focused on Samuel Beckett and Henry Fielding, have little influence on his novels. If there is...