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Once culturally irredeemable, the 1970s have engendered a nostalgia that shows little sign of waning. Designers, filmmakers, and musicians draw inspiration from that which they once reviled. In the process of being rehabilitated, however, the decade has been utterly depoliticized. The left- and right-wing radicalism that defined the '70s far more than did garish fashions and disco has been largely forgotten. In the popular imagination, Kent State and the Weathermen--if remembered at all--have been relocated to the distant '60s, where they seem to make more sense. Yet 1970s America was a nation bent on self-destruction. Nothing symbolizes this more forcefully than the 1978 mass suicide of the mostly underclass followers of Jim Jones in Guyana.

In England, the 1970s were equally extreme: IRA bombings, race riots, Third World-like economic crises, and violent strikes. Yet there too, benign nostalgia has set in. In his new novel, The Rotters' Club, Jonathan Coe sets out to reclaim the decade's radicalness, or, as he writes, "the ungodly strangeness of it." Coe first came to the attention of American readers with 1995's The Winshaw Legacy: Or, What a Carve Up!, his venomous satire of 1980s Britain under Margaret Thatcher. In The Rotters' Club, he's doing more than jumping back to an earlier decade. This is a richer, more deeply felt work, more ambiguous and less didactic. Coe still devises situations that elicit genuine guffaws, but the humor is intrinsic to the complex inner life he gives his characters.

Set between 1973 and '79 in the increasingly post-industrial city of Birmingham, the novel focuses on four friends at an all-boys private school (including Ben Trotter, teased as "Bent Rotter," the novel's quiet, introspective center) and their families, deftly moving between the adolescent cleverness and trauma of school life, hardball union politics on the factory floor, and home's curious blend of affection and desperation. Although the historical details are exactly right, from the bitter NME-Melody Maker rivalry to the anti-immigrant hatred, the scenery never overwhelms this densely layered, lightly told story about growing up and moving on.