Tony Parsons

Tony Parsons lives in a comfortable London house with a beautiful Asian wife, and his novels have secured him a place in literary culture. He has a post-modern pedigree, refreshingly different from conventional middle class success. One of his earlier works - Notes From the Front Line of Popular Culture - is no longer in print, and that probably suits him. It's a fine testimony to the raw energy of the punk rock era - and his journalistic presence within it - but is ultimately immature and pointless, rather like the singers and musicians he interviewed. He was still learning his trade, thrilled at the opportunities his work presented.

One For My Baby is mostly a repetition of earlier preoccupations, as depicted in Man and Boy. It's no worse for that, and has no pretensions at being high literature. I never read Parsons in New Musical Express; I bought it occasionally in the early 1980s, hoping it was a key to understanding the music around me and my own self, but I found it unreadable: full of dense, badly written commentary too arcane to make any sense. I did read him in GQ, and remember a piece about martial arts, and a line about women giving men blow jobs to be polite - indicative of modern life, he said.

Martial arts, the changing world and the different generations - these are some of Parsons interests. The hero in his latest book - Alfie Budd - takes comfort in the memory of the Woodbine and Old Spice smells of his grandfather. In Man and Boy, it is the hero's father who used Old Spice; in both cases, it represents a boyhood where life was blissfully simple and secure, surrounded by the certainties of a masculinity that no longer exists. In both books, the hero has to work out for themselves what masculinity means, outgrow casual sex, acknowledge the enduring importance of the human heart, and how long-suffering women understand this.

Parsons knows a little about Tai Chi, although there is far more to it than his book suggests; its slow practice is for him a symbol of calm wisdom amidst the harsh contradictions of city life, where change is one of the biggest human challenges -life is "a series of hellos and goodbyes".

I'm not sure what women make of Tony Parsons; together with Nick Hornby, he represents contemporary man, the male-confessional equivalent of Bridget Jones. Men have their weaknesses and are sometimes unsettled, but eventually learn it is they who suffer most from their inability to relate to women with heart as well as groin. Inside, they have emotional needs just as strong, and eventually have to yield to this, as in a Tai Chi dance. When Alfie's grandmother is dying, his father feels he constantly has to be doing something, being useful, justifying himself; he cannot just sit and feel.

As with Man and Boy, there's lots of humour and some beautiful observation. The 13 year old daughter of Jackie - Alfie's eventual partner - is called Plum. She is overweight, hides behind a long fringe, idolises a celebrity wrestler called The Slab, and is cruelly bullied at school. She makes friends with Alfie's elderly grandmother, who she thinks is "funny" and "cool"; they share her interest in wrestling-entertainment. She thinks she is the only person who likes her just as she is, and not as they would like her to be. When she dies, Plum runs away from home, overwhelmed with the circumstances of her life and her inability to resolve them. Like Alfie - and everyone else - she is a wounded person in need of comfort. Alfie eventually finds her sleeping in a photo booth, and becomes the father that she lacks.

The book is punctuated with references to Alfie's emotional learning, navigating life where the signposts of the earlier generation have vanished, and the world is more confusing, harsh, and contingent. In Man and Boy, hero Harry Silver constantly feels he will never compare to his tough, war-hero father; his mother has to tell him that today, men have different battles to fight and are a different kind of hero.

Parsons writes a good story, describing the emotional predicament of being a man. You don't necessarily agree with him all the time - by idolising Frank Sinatra, for example, as a symbol of tough-sensitive masculinity. But the underlying sentiment is perfectly acceptable.

One for My Baby begins when Alfie falls in love with Rose, a lawyer living in Hong Kong, on the verge of late-nineties independence. After she dies in an accident, she becomes an exotic and unattainable symbol, for a love that cannot be repeated. This is Alfie's illusion, and he has to learn not to compare women with ghosts from the past.