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The joke on Coates is that he knows his Austen far too well. He keeps trying to steer the characters in The Watsons in "original" directions, for fear they will grow too like the characters in other Austen novels—until honest imitation melts into irresistible parody. It all goes to show the difficulties confronting an author who has been raised in the world of Thurber, Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett and must yet deal deadpan with ploys (such as swoons and blushes) of which he has had no experience.
Still, Coates's Watsons has two virtues. One is purely malicious: bits of it can be read aloud to fanatical Janeites to see if they can guess the true author. The other virtue is that Author Coates has managed to recapture much of the attitude to love and life that Jane Austen once expressed in a single short query: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"