We first got to know Harry Silver in Tony Parsons's best-selling debut Man and Boy. Back then, the emotionally muddled protagonist had a troubled career in television, a seven-year-old son he loved with a passion, a wife who left him after he was unfaithful and a whole lot of perplexing questions about life, love and parenthood.
"If it ain't broke, why fix it," you can imagine Parsons thinking as he sat down to write this sequel, Man and Wife.
The situations may have moved on, but Harry Silver is still perplexed. After a messy divorce to first wife Gina, access to his Star Wars-obsessed son Pat is limited to weekly outings with all the other Sunday Dads. Harry has to get used to life in a blended family - "like the Brady Bunch when a man and a woman put their old families together to make a new family" explains his friend - but something doesn't fit.
Now married to Cyd, he desperately wants his new wife to get pregnant so they can be a "proper family". Cyd has a child from another relationship and Gina has married Richard.
Harry's father died in Man and Boy, and here his mother contracts breast cancer. As in Man and Boy, his parents are a recurring symbol of everything he is striving for in a family but, through his own failings, just can't seem to grasp. The trouble with Harry is that he can't stop dreaming about the quality of the grass on the other side. So when he meets the serene Kuzami, he gravitates towards her while moving further away from Cyd.
Reading Man and Wife, you spend half the time wanting to tell Harry Silver to cop on and be happy with what he's got. What saved this reader from abandoning him is the fact that Parsons has created a plausible and likeable contemporary male voice. You might want to shake Harry Silver at times, but Parsons incisive style makes you hang around to see if things work out.
And they do. Sort of. "In a world full of choices, we chose each other," says Harry as it dawns on him that sticking to these choices might be the best way forward. But there is something slightly unsatisfying about the deeply practical conclusion to this wistful and thought provoking novel.
Roisín Ingle is an Irish Times journalist
Man and Wife. By Tony Parsons. Harper Collins. 297 pp. £16.99 sterling