Although American rock critic Lester Bangs was the first writer to define 'punk rock' as a musical and cultural force, English journalist Tony Parsons was one of the first to test punk's limits. At New Musical Express (NME), Parsons defied his bosses and championed the Ramones, Sex Pistols and their legions of offspring as musically, lyrically and culturally legitimate.
Doubling back on the punk gesture, Parsons' first book, "The Boy Looked at Johnny," cowritten with fellow NME staffer Julie Burchill, skewered most of the late '70s punk artists with the vicious, iconoclastic glee of punk itself. A literate speedfreak with an even bigger sneer than Bangs, Parsons was the last pupil in the class of '76 you'd expect to write a touching, populist novel about the joys and challenges of family life.
But Tony Parsons did it. His first novel, "Man & Boy," first published in England in 1999, has sold millions of copies in 30 countries. An award-winning magazine reporter in the 1980s and popular television personality in the '90s, and still musically astute, Parsons lends real personality and creative imagination to Harry Silver, the half-likeable, half-loathsome narrator of "Man & Boy."
Introduced to Parsons' novel through steady promotion and advertising from multinational publishers HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, non-cult readers worldwide have connected with "Man & Boy" in such raw, emotional ways. An ordinary book promo appearance erupted into a shouting match. An anonymous fan wrote to Parsons, "Your book made me cry. I don't mean I wept silent tears as I turned the pages. I mean that I sobbed so hard that I thought, at the time, I might never stop." Men's groups have solicited Parsons as spokesman. Film rights to "Man & Boy" have been sold to Miramax.
As a teenager, Tony Parsons first saw the United States covering the musical (and other) adventures of English, Irish and American rock 'n' roll groups. Now travelling the country in support of his own work, Parsons is a star in his own right. At 7 p.m., Mon., June 3, he will read at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop at 2559 N. Downer Ave., at East Webster Place on Milwaukee's East Side.
OMC: So what's it like to be touring the United States like a rock star?
TP: Not quite a rock star. I haven't thrown my TV out of ... [dissipates into laughter] It's odd, it's strange, because my early career was very much the Cameron Crowe "Almost Famous" experience. The first few times I came to America were with bands; with Thin Lizzy, with the Clash on their first trip, to interview Springsteen, and to interview David Johansen, but you don't get a true picture, because you meet them in Philadelphia and then you go to New York and then you go home. And they went on.
I'm on the very first leg of this tour, and they're quite grueling, you know? These days I go to the gym, rather than taking drugs with Joe Strummer or Phil Lynott. I don't know how bands do it. Well, the answer is a lot of them don't, especially a lot of these pale English guitar bands. They were broken by touring America, like the Sex Pistols were. And I'm determined to make it to the end of the tour. [laughs]
OMC: Your NME pieces were always exciting and fast-paced, so much so that I used to fly off track and skip paragraphs, pages ahead. I found myself doing the same thing with "Man & Boy."
TP: A lot of work went into making it a page-turner. There's so much competition around these days, so many demands on the attention of the readers. I think writers have got an obligation and a responsibility to make their stuff gripping from beginning to end.
A lot of people have said to me that they've read ["Man & Boy"] in one, two, or three sittings -- you know, they've read it very, very quickly -- and that's what I want. I want them to be that engaged by the story that they can't put it down, because that happens to me to, because I'm a reader as well as a writer. I love nothing more than a book that just feels like a complete luxury when I can get back to it and get stuck into it again.
I did four or five drafts. A lot of work went into ["Man & Boy"], to give it that quality. Successful books tend to stick around for a while. This book is probably going to be around long after I've gone, and so I wanted to get it right.
OMC: Do people who read "Man & Boy" in one sitting enjoy or connect with the story more so than those who might put it down a few times?
TP: Maybe they're just more more receptive and susceptible to it. You can't please everybody, but this book has reached a very wide range of people. It's sold almost two million in the U.K. now; it's 1.6 million in the sales figures for the paperback. It's a huge demographic: it's teenage girls, 70-year-old grandmothers -- it's got a much bigger audience than I ever anticipated. I always expected it to be read by guys of my vintage who had been 'round the block a few times, and those guys read it, but it burst out.
Women discovered it, and teenagers discovered it, and their grannies discovered it, which is something you can't plan for and you can't explain. With any bestseller, I think a strong element is dumb luck. You can't sit down and calculate what's going to appeal to people.
OMC: Despite his provincial and often selfish attitudes and behavior, the protagonist Harry seems to have an amazing faith in the idea that life -- comunication, memory, work, art, sex, sacrifice, tenderness, all of it -- has meaning.
TP: I think he wins people over. Especially I thought women wouldn't like the book because they would think, 'This guy's got a good marriage, he's got a wife who loves him, then he goes and sleeps with somebody else.' I thought that they would just turn off and never give him a chance -- and he's meant to be insensitive at the start of the book. He's meant to be disconnected. You always take that chance that you're going to lose the reader.
But, when he's thinking, 'Well, I don't understand what the problem with my wife is; she wants to reach me, she can always leave a message with my secretary,' that's how he thinks at the start. He has to learn that leaving a message with the secretary's not quite good enough. So he does win people over. I think, really, the reason why ["Man & Boy"]'s been such a success is because he's human, and he's fallible, and he's not perfect, and he does stupid things, but fundamentally he's got a good heart, fundamentally he's got a decent heart.
And I think most of us are like that. Most of us do stupid things in our life. We have our fallible moments, and then we try and make up for it. I just think that's very human.
A lot of people have written to me, and people approach me every day. I mean, people come up to me every day. The day before I left, a guy stopped to ask for directions on the street where I live in North London. I told him where he was going and where he was going wrong, and as he walked away, he said, "I really enjoyed 'Man & Boy,' by the way." A book reaches critical mass and -- I think it's the million mark -- suddenly it feels like everybody's read it.
And, of course, everybody hasn't read it. There's only a certain number of people in any culture that [sic] actually buy and read and consume books, but people see their own life reflected in it, and that's what gives it meaning to them. They don't see my life, and a lot of these people never heard of me before they read the book. That's true in the U.K. too, although I've been around for quite a while in the U.K. Some people remember me from the NME, and I did a TV show for six years, but still, maybe even the majority of the people who buy ["Man & Boy"] it in the U.K. have never heard of me before. It's the book that's the star.
[Readers] see their own lives reflected in it, and it's funny how it happens, because you get 50-year-old guys who identify with Pat, you know ... the kid. The British writer, Douglas Adams, who died in California last year, the guy that [sic] wrote "[The] Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he was a big, strong, early supporter of the book. His parents are divorced. He said he completely identified with the kid in it, the 5-year-old.
It's difficult for me when 15-year-old girls, 16-year-old girls write me. I think, 'What could they possibly be getting out of this book?' I think it's because we've all got families. I think it's really as simple and as fundamental as that. We've all got families and they've all got love in them, and they've all got dysfunction in them too -- to greater and lesser degrees.
People do connect with ["Man & Boy"], and they connect on a really personal level. I'm almost the middleman; the relationship is between them and the book. Reading a book that you love -- it's a really intimate transaction, much more so than watching a film or listening to a record. You have to spend a lot of time with it. ["Man & Boy"]'s not even a short book, so it's a long time to read. It takes you into a very personal space, I think, and touches real secret parts of your heart.
OMC: Once it's out there, you don't own it anymore. The story's not just yours.
TP: No, it's true. I did a reading at a prison in the U.K., and the guys in this prison were, like, some bad guys -- murderers and armed robbers. They were talking about Harry as though they were going to give him a good kicking, because they think he's got everything and he throws it away. "Why does he sleep with her?"
I said, "Well, you know, there's got to be drama! There's got to be conflict, there's got to be fuckups; otherwise there's no story." If you go to a prison, the first thing you see, of course, is loads of women and children outside the gates. These guys in prison very much feel separated from their families, and Harry is separated from his family.
I think there's a yearning for family at the core of ["Man & Boy"], which a lot of cons can identify with. It's really odd that you've got murderers and grannies buying your stuff. You think, 'Boy, what have I done here?' I think it's kind of a unique experience for me. I'm not sure I'll ever repeat that.
OMC: Do you get people from a more academic or postmodern stripe who find themselves actually charmed by the story?
TP: Yeah, I think so. The more you look at it, it's a very simple story. It's not a complicated story; it's about very fundamental stuff like parents, children, growing old, dying, and growing up. It's almost impossible to generalize about the audience because it's 30 countries now and it's sold a lot of books around the world.
It's odd -- you find out it's a bestseller in Poland, it's a bestseller in Sweden. You're trying to think, 'What links Sweden and Poland and Japan?' Some academics -- the more intellectual end of the literary market -- have liked the book.
Some people, in all honesty, have been turned off by it, especially the feminists of an older vintage, '70s feminists. The Germaine Greer generation have taken an active dislike to the book, and ... I think it's because Harry's not quite 'new man' enough. In theory he should be. This guy looking after his son alone should be what they ordered, but he still likes looking at women's legs, he's still got an eye for the girls, and he's still unreconstructed, really. He's slowly emerging from his old masculine chrysalis, but he's not like a feminist poster boy.
{INSERT_RELATED}And that can't be coincidence, because ["Man & Boy"] got good reviews in the States, and it got good reviews when it came out in the U.K., but the tendency is to forget -- and publishers like to forget -- that it also got some lousy reviews. And, almost exclusively, in the U.K., those reviews were by 55-year-old feminists.
OMC: Might part of the book's appeal to younger readers be due to the fact that Harry's not patronizing to the book's younger characters?
TP: I think that's true, and I also think that it's because -- although he's an adult -- the 'man and boy' of the title is Harry and his dad, it's Harry and his son, and it's Harry himself too. He's still got ungrown, unformed, immature elements to him. He's still trying to invent himself, he's still reaching out for the person he's going to be, and I think young people identify with that.
OMC: Harry says that one of the worst things about divorce is that it makes children hide their hearts. What's worse for a person, especially a young person: crying or being down and not being able to cry?
TP: Well, there comes a point when the crying has to stop. My generation are sort of caught between real old-school machismo -- my father's lot, the men that fought World War II -- and my son's generation. I think my generation has a fear of crying and a fear of tears, because we're afraid we're never going to stop.
OMC: Is that a men's thing?
TP: Yeah, I think it is. When I went to Princess Diana's funeral, the most impressive part of the day was the fact that those two boys -- her sons, who were really quite young at the time, I think they were about 15 and 11 -- could walk behind their mother's coffin and not cry. I really admired that, and a lot of people thought it was bad that children should be so buttoned up, but there's a part of me that thinks that's a good thing, because if you just let yourself unravel, then where will it end? But that is a man thing.
OMC: Because we've got to go off and do our job!
TP: Hunt that dinosaur! Bring the meat back to the cave!
OMC: Your old punk attitude reappears with a vengeance in the scene outside Harry's son's school, where Harry's waiting with his son and his son's girl classmate, and the girl's babysitter doesn't show up. Suddenly he's got some energetic replies to all the crappy putdowns he's been taking from people. When you wrote that scene, did you feel any sort of bile rising up?
TP: Yeah, it's an education. Being a single parent is an education. You're alienated, you're in a minority. Although there are millions of single parents in the world, you are in a minority. And I think any minority feels the bile rising up at times. Any minority feels, 'This isn't fair. This is wrong. This is an injustice.' I think that's true whether you're disabled or whether you're from a racial minority or a social minority like single fathers.
There's a lot of bile knocking around. There's a lot of times when you think, 'This just isn't right' and 'This isn't fair,' so yeah, it wasn't faked. It was genuine. I think that's good. It puts a bit of lead in his pencil, as we say.
OMC: Harry's lawyer Nigel talks about the law favoring the mother in questions of child residency. Does it really? If it tends to place the child of a divorced couple with the mother, doesn't that impose a certain economic burden on her?
TP: Yeah, you could interpret it that way. Nigel is there as a warning, really, to Harry, that he could learn to hate women, that he could become this guy that says, 'These bitches have got it all in their favor. We've gotta hit back.'
OMC: Thus Nigel's surname [Batty].
TP: Yeah, exactly. [laughs] And there's part of Harry that's like that, that feels that at the school gates. But he's a true believer and he is a romantic and he does think, 'We can work this out, and even if I can't work it out with my ex-wife, then I can find somebody else I can love again. I can find a partner again, and it doesn't have to be this way, this us-against-them, this sort of war, this sex war, that old-time sex war again.'
I don't even know that I've got mixed feelings. I think, probably, in most cases, it makes sense for children to be with their mothers. Some men's groups in the U.K. have tried to get me to be some kind of spokesman for them or for single fathers. To me, it's not really about that. If it's about anybody's rights, then it's about children's rights, because that's what I think gets really shafted in a divorce. I think it's children that get the short end of the stick, not men or women, because men and women can start again. They can go dating and go dancing and lose some weight and get a good haircut and start having good sex again. And it can all be 'Hey, I didn't think I'd ever be doing this again, this is pretty good.'
And it's not like that for children. If men and women fuck up their lives, then they fuck up their lives, but the children have done nothing wrong. They are completely innocent in every sense of the word. So I do see ["Man & Boy"] and always saw it as a book about children's rights.
I think it's unmanly, too, for us to complain too much, even when some of the points that Nigel Batty makes I agree with. Fathers should be given a fair shake in discussions, but I think that ["Man & Boy"]'s a book that supports the rights of children more than anything, certainly more than it supports the rights of men.
OMC: Since Harry so easily falls in love, you could call him romantic in the broadest sense of the word, because it doesn't always matter who he's with. Does that make him less of a romantic to certain women readers?
TP: I think he seems real to a lot of women readers. I think they can see their partners and their ex-partners and their husbands in Harry. They can see that the reason why he sleeps with someone [besides his wife] is opportunity, really. He gets a chance, and he takes it. I think a lot of [women] realize that that's what men are like. It works a little differently. Someone like Harry -- if he has sex with a woman, then he can convince himself that he's in love with [her], whereas with women, it tends to be the other way around in my experience. If they can convince themselves they're in love with some useless guy in bar, then he'll get lucky.
OMC: Is Harry's comment, "Some fathers are home all the time," addressed to the unemployment problem that's plagued the U.K. for our adult lives, or is it more to do with male laziness?
TP: Well, it's both of those things. It's also the fact that my dad went out every morning for...40 years or so, and I've worked at home for 20 years. Our lives are just very different from our fathers'. Technology plays a large part in that.
I work for a newspaper in the U.K., the Daily Mirror. I've written a column for them for six years, and I've never been in to the office. I don't need to be in to the office. Even five years ago, certainly 10 years ago, when I would have been in the office, I'm at home or hanging around the street, eyeing up the woman next door -- in completely different situations because of changes in technology, which are really profound changes.
People don't like travelling so much these days. They don't feel so safe. It's really a drag, especially after September 11. Security's so tight that it's incredibly inconvenient to travel anywhere, so men are spending more time at home.
It's unemployment, it's changes in technology, but the reality is just: men are hanging around the house a lot more than they used to. Someone like Harry -- he's a TV producer, and he has to go in to the studio, but when he's doing part-time executive production, there's a lot that he can do from home.
I do remember my mother saying to me, "Wait until your father gets home," and you don't really hear that anymore. Even with guys who have to go to the office, I think it's died out.
It's funny, because it's an autobiographical novel. The stuff in the book about Harry's dad is largely based on my own father. He was a war hero, and he was a tough old-school father. He died of lung cancer, he died in a very macho way. So that is autobiographical, but I think the point that people miss is that you can't stop life happening to you.
And all that happened to my dad in 1987. And my mum was dying of cancer when I was writing "Man & Boy." She died a month before it was published in the U.K. in '99. Although ["Man & Boy"] is autobiographical, and people say, 'Oh, you know, his dad was an old command and he won the DSM [Distinguished Service Medal] and he died of lung cancer,' that's all true.
But ["Man & Boy"] has a deeper level of autobiography, which is not so clear and not so apparent. Even if you're writing about part of your life. If you wrote something about when you were in high school, it's still going to be informed by everything that's happened to you since. I think that's good, because that makes your life everybody's life, and gives it a more universal quality than it might have had.
OMC: The welfare state as surrogate family rears up quite a lot in the book. What do you think Harry might say -- and what do you say -- about Engels' observation that the family is mostly a scheme of privatization of child care?
TP: Harry would have a much more sentimental take than Engels or Marx, I guess. I think maybe he would agree with that at the start of the book, but he learns to see caring for his child as a privilege. I think, at the start, he sees it more as a burden, more as something that's got to be sorted out. Not that he doesn't love his son, but I think it doesn't even occur to him that this is his job and his responsibility. So I think he changes his mind about it, and maybe he could persuade Engels and Marx to do the same.
OMC: Apart from reading the newspaper, Harry seems disconnected from the world outside his nuclear family. He appears not to be politically involved. Or is he, on the most important -- and too often overlooked -- level?
TP: I think he's engaged on a political level, not in the party political sense, not in the traditional organized politics. I think his politics are like a lot of our religion; [they're] not organized. A lot of people have got religious feelings, but they don't feel they fit into a particular faith particularly well. I think Harry's political beliefs are like that.
I think he is a political figure in a lot of ways. He's the modern father. Some of the people that disliked "Man & Boy" in the U.K. said it's a very conservative book, that it's a book about family values ... you know, with a kind of Eisenhower '50s/John Major take on 'If we all got back to the old family unit, then all our problems would fade away.'
One of the biggest arguments I've seen between two readers: a book event I did was about that subject. Some old guy got up and said it's a book that promotes conservative family values, and this woman got up was screaming and shouting and denouncing him and wouldn't hear a word said against the book.
The trouble with the criticism is that...I can understand how someone would say that, but I like to think of it as...an old-fashioned book, ... but I think it's also a modern book. Harry's life is quite a radical modern life. He learns to accept that being a single father and a man caring for a child is normal. He learns to see that as nothing special. It's precious, but it's not special.
When [Harry and his wife Gina] initially break up, Gina says to him, "'Don't think you're any kind of hero. Women do this every day.'" I think he gets to that point, where it seems like a normal thing for him to be doing. In a small, modest way, that is something radical.
OMC: Did you let your son in his childhood listen to songs with lots of explicit language?
TP: Yeah, I mean he comes from a generation that grew up with hip-hop. He didn't really discover rock music and white boys with guitar until he was quite old, until he was ... 17, maybe a little bit younger than that. Essentially he grew up listening to 2Pac and Biggie and all this stuff. When I used to stop and listen to some of it, I -- this guy that used to take drugs with the Sex Pistols -- was incredibly shocked.
But I never stopped him. I'm a bit of a libertarian on these things. It wouldn't have occurred to me to stop him listening to it, if that's what you wondered.
OMC: Harry is pretty nonplussed by the lyrical content of what his son is bumpin' through the headphones.
TP: In a way it almost reinforces (Harry's son's) innocence. It almost makes him seem more innocent, that he's listening to it on a really pure level. A lot of older kids, adolescents would be listening to it, I think, the way kids used to listen to heavy metal. You know, the most nerdy, weak, wimpish kids were listening to this stuff because it made them feel empowered. And (Harry's son Pat's) kind of at a stage before that. It's just the first music that anybody's ever given him, and he loves it, you know? It's his own.
OMC: Harry's actually portrayed as having very little musical passion. Did you want to avoid sounding too much like Nick Hornby?
TP: Subconsciously, it could be that, just a technical editorial decision. Nick, who I get really bracketed with, lives in the next street to me. We write about the same tiny little patch in North London. We've both got two books in the Top 10 bestseller list, and they're really just scrapping it out, and it's a real sort of Oasis-v.-Blur thing, this kind of tribal feud which the British really love.
I think, subconsciously, you're right. I just thought, 'He's covered this ground so completely with "High Fidelity" and his other stuff.' And he writes about music for The New Yorker and everything. Not me, who's known as a music journalist, and a lot of people think of me in those terms. I thought I'd give it a miss.
It's funny, because music is important in the book, but it's not important to Harry. It's important to Harry's dad, who listens to Sinatra and Dean Martin, to Sammy Davis, Jr., and it's important to Pat, who listens to 2Pac and Biggie. In the new book, the book that I've just finished, "Man & Wife," which is the sequel, it's important to his mother, who turns out to be a big country and western fan, a big Dolly Parton fan.
So it's funny, you know? It's important to everybody apart from Harry, and I think that, subconsciously, just me putting a bit of clear blue water between me and Nick because, you know, music and what people listen to is very evocative. Ray Davies of The Kinks once said that he couldn't look at someone's record collection without weeping. Admittedly, this is a very highly strung, emotional guy, but [laughing] I can kind of understand what he means, because our record collections speak volumes about us.
OMC: Is Harry's incessant reference to 'the lousy modern world' a tip of the hat to Paul Weller?
TP: Yeah.
OMC: When TV show host Marty Mann attacks Cliff the environmentalist on camera, is that Bill Grundy taking on the poor young Sex Pistols on his home turf?
Yeah.
And, last but not least... (first reader to spot the author-confirmed Clash reference receives a free, autographed copy of "Man & Boy."). Send your guesses to e_beaumont@yahoo.com.
