How a dad lost the plot

One of publishing’s most lucrative areas has always been parenting advice; it is only relatively recently that fictional parenting has turned into a reliable money-spinner. This happened around the time Nick Hornby decided to write about the subject. Since then, Tony Parsons has muscled in with his damp-eyed reflections on the fissioning nuclear family, and, someone having realised that mothers, too, have been known to be involved in child-rearing, along came Allison Pearson and her remarkably successful I Don’t Know How She Does It.

Well, writing about parenting will always be read by someone, because that someone will need either advice on how to cope or reassurance that Not Quite Coping is forgivable, or at least common. Dave Hill’s Dad’s Life shows how a man can bring up three children on his own and yet still come through the experience, achieving love and happiness along the way. It is, in short, that possibly lucrative link between Allison Pearson and Tony Parsons.

Like Parsons, Hill writes in fairly comprehensively the same way: short sentences.

Short paragraphs. Effortlessly demotic. (You won’t find a word like "demotic" here, though. In fact, even "effortlessly" may be a bit long.) Designed to tug at the heartstrings.

Joe Stone, a tender, charming, but not very successful artist, has been abandoned by his wife, Dilys, for another man, leaving him with three children.

The man she has abandoned him for is called Pinnock. Who, we learn, goes to Iron John-type weekends, bonding with other men. In a non-sexual fashion, of course. He is, though, wealthy, bearded and drives a 4x4. You may suspect something of the line we are expected to take on this man because Pinnock sounds something like "pillock", a fact we are reminded of a few times during the course of this interminable novel.

As with Parsons, then, the playing field is tilted horribly unfairly. Stone is deserted for no other reason than that his wife wishes to be with someone else. He agrees to a week-on, week-off child-sharing arrangement. After a while she informs the school and the local surgery — not him — that she wishes the children to take her lover’s surname. Meanwhile, Stone tries to find love again.

Let me save you the bother: he finds it, with a woman called Angela. More than the fact that she is tall and called Angela I cannot tell you, for whatever Hill’s strengths as a writer are, they do not include the creation of plausible or three-dimensional characters whom one can imagine having a life when the pages of the book are shut. With the possible exceptions of the narrator and one or two of his children.

From the latter we hear much, as their conversation takes up a significant proportion of the novel. Being composed of short sentences, like most children’s, this means that many of the pages can be read quite quickly, so one should not complain. But readers who are sensitive to the ventriloquised speeches of stuffed toys with names like Mr Toothy may want to skip these pages altogether. They may miss some of the plot but that is a small price to pay.
And after reading this book, it will be a while before you catch me sneering at Tony Parsons again.