Man and Wife Tony Parsons HarperCollins, 308pp, £16.99 ISBN 0002261839

As I was finishing the last chapters of Man and Wife, my spouse of nearly ten years went to the supermarket. When he returned minus the contact lens fluid I had asked for, I flew into a rage that took no account of everything else he had managed to salvage from Somerfield's. Or the fact that he had bothered to go there in the first place. As far as I was concerned, only one thing mattered: he had not bought the lens fluid, meaning He Didn't Care.

This is the effect that Tony Parsons has on you. After a few hours immersed in the world of TP's navel-gazing hero, Harry Silver, you emerge in a state of peevish emotional solipsism. Harry, you see, is a half-empty-glass kind of a guy. He takes himself incredibly seriously and no one else seriously at all. Having split from one beautiful wife who adored him, he has, miraculously, found another beautiful wife who does the same. He's got a funky dress-down TV job and little Pat, his handsome, sweet-natured son. Yet, for all this, Harry isn't happy. He is insecure, vain, mawkish and suspicious, always on the lookout for threats to his not-quite paradise. And also to his son, who is a smaller version of himself.

Man and Wife records what happens after Harry marries party-food-business-running Cyd. She's a kind of Jerry Hall of catering - long-limbed, Texan, a deft cook in the kitchen and equally skilled in the bedroom. This being 2002, she sees no reason why she can't be hot stuff professionally, too; Harry, however, has other ideas. As Cyd works long hours, his amour propre is sufficiently wounded for him to contemplate getting back with his ex-wife (who has moved to and come back from the US in the course of the novel) as well as an affair with a Japanese photographer. The marriage almost founders, until Cyd gets rid of her smart-arse ambitions, back into the fold and - as Harry has always wanted - up the duff. Cue happy ending and concluding credits.

But how happy can it be, given Harry is such a throwback? His idea of a female role model is his mother, married/devoted to his father until the latter's death. Their union is seen by their son in terms of cloying sentimentality: all working-class values, a no-fuss, no-mess, no-complaining approach to life. Harry wants a marriage like that. The problem is, he is incapable of living a life like that. He is ruled both by his penis and by a burning, resentful self-righteousness. Despite his veneration of old-fashioned emotional and social self-discipline, Harry is incapable of either.

He is, however, no mere Alfie-style, chauvinist swamp-monster. Harry's sexism is all the nastier for its being deceptive; post-New Man, couched in page after page of pithy, witty, emotionally literate self-justification, interspersed with displays of extravagant affection for his son or equally self-congratulatory appreciation of the sexiness of his wives. He is either a wonderfully clever, or a deeply depressing creation.

But I couldn't tell you which.

Parsons, you see, writes such a slick, sophisticated and persuasive novel that it's impossible to know whether you're supposed to love Harry or loathe him. I finished this book unable to tell whether it was skilful sleight of hand or sentimental mush. Is Harry a multi-layered, manipulative anti-hero through whom Parsons sends up the egomaniacal emotional incontinence of the post-Diana age? Or is he a hideously genuine attempt to lay bare the soul of Modern Man? Perhaps more depressingly still, is one the same as the other?

Wendy Holden's latest novel is Fame Fatale (Headline)

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