Fertile ground, love

The family way by tony parsons(harpercollins, (pounds) 17.99) HAVING mined the male psyche in One For My Baby, Man And Boy and Man And Wife, Tony Parsons turns his attention at last to the distaff side. Fertility is the subject this time: its politics, its problems, its place in the life cycle of the time-poor high achievers who people his metropolitan landscapes. Deciding whether or not to make babies is, Parsons notes, "the great modern subject". In pursuing it here has left no demographic type uncatalogued, no question unaddressed, no trend unexamined. It's as if he has ingested a year's worth of Cosmopolitans - the magazine, not the cocktail - and, after a suitable period of gestation, birthed this.

The novel centres on the three Jewell sisters, deserted by their actress mother when they were children and raised in a fitful manner by a father, also an actor, who was well-meaning but absent much of the time through work.

Megan, the youngest, is a trainee GP in the Hackney badlands. It's through her that Parsons tells us everything we need to know about IVF, pre-eclampsia, endometriosis, sperm motility and the rest. Cat is the eldest, a career woman who enjoys a life unencumbered by marriage or kids but who is fiercely protective of the two younger sisters she feels she raised on her own. In the middle is Jessica - beautiful, married and desperately trying for a child with her husband, Paolo.

Through this troika of potential breeders, Parsons is able to cover all the angles for his 30-something readership. Whether they are single, married, living together, childless or like the old woman who lived in the shoe, they will find their lives - and their nagging fears - mirrored somewhere in The Family Way.

Megan becomes pregnant after she breaks up with her long-term boyfriend and has a one-night stand with an Australian dive instructor. (Big questions: should she keep it? How do you juggle a career with life as a single parent?) Jessica is despairing at her apparent lack of fertility and sees Megan's pregnancy as the ultimate cosmic insult. (Big questions: what effect can childlessness have on a couple? Is it sex or love that makes a baby?) Cat, meanwhile, is coming to realise that her life isn't complete without a child - something of a problem given that boyfriend Rory has had a vasectomy. (Big question: can you leave it too late? What if you meet the right guy at the wrong time or, worse, the wrong guy in the only time you've got left?) Parsons is good at all this zeitgeist surfing. What he is not so good at is fleshing out his women, ironic in a novel in which the workings of their insides are the prime subject matter. There is little attempt at characterisation. Instead of showing us who the sisters are and what they think he simply tells us. The result is breathless and journalistic but it does allow the story to gallop along, and the rapid accumulation of facts and events give it a certain vigour. Stylistically, it's very much in the Good Beach Read category. Then again, nobody would ever pretend that Parsons was a literary writer.

But there is something more. Ghosting through the story is Olivia, the mother who deserted her girls and her husband for a succession of men. Briefly a starlet in the 1950s - kind of a B-list Joan Collins - she slammed the door on her family leaving only a whiff of Chanel No 5 and this simple admonition: "Your parents ruin the first half of your life and your children ruin the second half." They are the novel's opening words and they hang over it like a mathematical theorem waiting to be disproved.

That the theorem is disproved comes down to one word, love. When Paolo's sister-in-law Naoko leaves his womanising brother, Michael, taking their daughter Chloe back to her native Japan, Michael says: "I've lost her, Paolo, lost the love of my life." Paolo knows he doesn't mean Naoko. The immoveable fact at the heart of The Family Way - and the one that gives it any profoundity it posseses - is that the bond between parent and child is adamantine. Parsons is never so jaundiced as to lose sight of that simple, cherishable truth.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
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