Man and Boy

Harry Silver, the book's anti-hero, has it all: a beautiful wife, an angelic son and a high-paying job. His life is just about perfect, until one night he casually sleeps with a slim redheaded coworker who has "that kind of fine Irish skin that is so pale it looks as though it has never seen the sun". After the fateful night, his life falls apart. He loses his job and his wife in rapid succession, and finds himself a single, unemployed parent. It is an excellent education for a man who up until now has been immature and irresponsible, and Parsons has some strong points to make about the puerility of far too many contemporary males: "Being a man is like being chained to the village idiot." At times he piles on the disasters and plot-twists a little too thickly, but the ending is wildly romantic, redemptive and optimistic. In other words, Harry grows up. -- Christopher Hart

Reader Reviews:

'Nice' (2/4 people found this helpful)

Pretty engaging and heartwarming, as long as you've got a soft spot for 'bloke lit' and don't want to be challenged.

Charmless, lazy, bloke lit (1/2 people found this helpful)

Man and Boy emanates from a peculiar (and now, thankfully, passe) genre of British fiction best described as Bridget Jones for middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged, middle-English blokes. Tony Parsons attempts to be self-effacing, human, down-to-earth and bittersweet, but isn't nearly a skilled or funny enough writer to pull if off.

The dust-jacket contains somewhat defensive praise for the book; the Observer's James Brown remarks "I cried five times and laughed out loud four", which is hardly a colossal strike rate on either count, and you do wonder what torment that reviewer must have been going through that he felt the need to count in the first place. In any case, he laughed and cried nine more times than I did.

Part of the trouble is Parson's protagonist, a flawed thirty-something dad who would be simply an uninteresting loser going through a midlife crisis (without explanation, motivation or justification he cheats on his wife) were it not for the suspicion that there is more than a little of the autobiographical about him. Parsons obviously likes Harry more than the character, in the abstract, deserves to be liked. Therefore Harry's wife - whom you would expect to be the victim and not the villain of the piece - is instead portrayed as unintentionally complicit in his adultery (by her standoffish behaviour) and we are told she has immediately rushed headlong into an adulterous relationship of her own, Parsons thereby letting his hero off the hook for his own misdemeanour altogether. Which doesn't exactly make for great drama or leave much scope for a character arc.

This might be excusable were the writing sharp or the anecdotes clever. No such luck: perhaps in his attempt to appeal the football-supporter constituency the book is aimed at, Parsons affects the patter of a self-important cabbie - or perhaps a columnist for the Mirror (which, quelle surprise, Parsons is) - telling you his life story, and the text is studded with ugly shorthand for descriptions Parsons can't be bothered to give himself: "all my images of this particular birthday seemed to be derived from some glossy American sit-com" and such things. All it's missing is a "know what I mean, Guv?" and a "I'm not being funny or nuffink..." - and that may be just because I didn't notice them.

Within that limited ambition, this book is effective enough, hence its popularity, and you'll rattle through it in a day, so it's not like you'll waste your life slogging through it.

But that's still faint praise, all the same.

Olly Buxton

Poor male attempt at 'Chick-lit'. (1/2 people found this helpful)

I bought this novel at an airport bookstore. I was hoping for a resonant exploration of the experiences of fatherhood, "son hood", marriage, divorce, remarriage, etc.

My expectations were not particularly great - Hornbyesque cleverness would have sufficed for a 3 1/2 hour flight. Sadly, even with the bar set this low, I was profoundly disappointed and surprisingly annoyed by this book.

Parsons' writing is lazy in the extreme; his characters are occasionally touching (a bit like the people in a Kleenex commercial) but are generally wooden and unconvincing. Tedious descriptive similes are repeated ad nauseum (I don't know how many times you want to hear someone's eyes described as "Tiffany-blue", but once was enough for me) and the authorial interjections are grating. Other Parson tricks include re-using the same similes over and over again. At three separate points in the book, certain children's toys are described as being as "big as a `fridge".

This book is a hugely wasted opportunity and reads like a cynical "lad-lit" cash-in, you'll probably find better writing in the brain-dead FHM lad's magazine.

"Being a man is like being chained to the village idiot." At times Pratsons piles on the disasters and plot-twists a little too thickly, and the ending is laugh-out-loud bad.

`Man and Boy' plumbs new depths of mediocrity. In fact, I felt no empathy or connection with any of the characters and the ending seemed a ploy to inadvertently explain this lack of depth.
Basically this book is a tedious effort from an amateur with delusions of being the next Nick Hornsby.

Stopping at all stations to cliche central! (5/6 people found this helpful)

After finishing this particular slice of banality I wondered why I'd bothered to waste these precious few hours of my life on a coming of age saga that failed to shed any light, whatsoever, on the mysteries of human experience. Moreover, the experience wasn't entertaining but simply downright depressing. I suppose, Parsons wasn't out to produce great literature but simply to cash in on the seeming market for what might be regarded as just another stage in the evolution of the realist novel, a la Bridget Jones. Whatever his motivation and indeed inspiration he appears to have successfully produced a barely diverting saga in which the protagonist, the son of Baby Boomers who missed the Boom, recounts the sorry consequences of a `night on the tiles'; `rush of blood to the head'; `moment of madness' - pick your own cliché - that causes him finally to grow up, face his parental responsibilities and be a man like his dear old `salt of the Earth', Diamond Geezer' dad. The reader is left wondering, however, if his dad should have paid more attention to his own parental responsibilities rather than popping round the pub on a Friday night `cos he deserves his drink' and stayed home, more often, to give his son the `right royal' slappings he so obviously missed!

Punk Hero (1/5 people found this helpful)

Tony Parsons along with Garry Bushell - Julie Burchill and Garry Johnson was the best writer of his generation on Punk Rock - Youth Fashion and drugs.
Parsons like Bushell - THE FACE
Burchill - Sugar Rush
Johnson - Till Death Us Do Part
has moved with ease from journalism to writing great novels.
This book is his best work so far and I know more classics will come from the pen of Mr Parsons

Tony Parsons

Editorial Review: