What lifts the sentimental to the sublime? How do Casablanca and It's A Wonderful Life avoid being mawkish? Why do Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin still break our hearts? The only common denominator is emotional truth and wit.
Tony Parsons is short of neither. Born on the wrong side of the tracks, he nonetheless made it into the Oxbridge-dominated media world of the 1970s where - with Julie Burchill - he turned the New Musical Ex- press from a niche publication into the must-have magazine of the punk generation. He famously married Burchill and, even more famously, brought up their child single-handedly.
Man And Boy is not, however, a confessional memoir but a finely constructed novel that says more about human relationships than a library of psychology manuals, hitting the funny bone and the emotional jugular at one and the same time.
It is a love story, or rather a story about love - the love of a manchild for his baby son and for his war-hero father; the love between a little boy and his grandfather; the love between a man and wife at the end of their life together and between a single father and a single mother at the beginning of theirs.
Harry marries Gina, and Pat ("Is our baby really so beautiful?") is the result. Four years on, Harry has a one-night stand ("The joy of meaningless sex should never be underestimated") and Gina leaves, unable to cope with his infidelity, which sends her ricocheting back to her father's infidelities - a memorable portrait of an ex-guitar player who never made it but is still living the dream. Harry's lone parenthood draws him closer to his own father, bringing with it a reassessment of his own childhood and what it means to be a man.
Man And Boy is as tautly plotted as a thriller and its rich cast of characters defy stereotype - from Harry's ex-Commando father who would catch a fly in a matchbox and release it into the garden rather than kill it, to Gina's 15-year-old proto-delinquent half-sister whose idea of a present to four-year-old Pat is a tape (which he loves) of rap music at its most violent. Only Harry's enigmatic wife Gina remains curiously out of reach, probably because - apart from her long legs - she clearly has little in common with Burchill.
The strength of Man And Boy lies in Parsons's portrayal of family relationships, both the known and the less-known - those second-time-around relationships that bring with them an extra level of confusion, and not simply for the child: jealousy of natural father and stepfather; trying to love a child who is not your own (particularly when yours is elsewhere); sexual etiquette when a toddler makes three. Parsons' ability to capture the ephemera of single-parenthood life transcends parody. Like Kern or Gershwin, he touches the universal via the specific and we weep. Well, I did anyway.
Penelope Dening is a journalist and author