In Which We Discuss A Friend of the Family

A Friend of the Family is the one novel that feels quite different from the rest of Jewell's style.

The friend in question is Gervase, an ageing rocker with a strange ability to empathise and see problems that people wouldn't normally confide in other people. The family is the Londons; mother, father and three boys, Tony, Sean and Ned. These boys each have their own problems - Tony feels that life has passed him by, and wonders how he went from being the catch to the chubby older brother. Ned just got back from three years in Australia with a crazy woman, and feels like he's fallen off the track at some point or another. He doesn't know where his life is going. And Sean, well Sean has it all - a best-selling novel and the fiancé of his dreams. Until, that is, he gets a bit more than he can handle.

It's hard to analyse why this is my favourite of Jewell's novels. It may be because it's less of a romantic comedy/drama, and more about a family. The point of it isn't to get the girl, it's to get the life (although in a few cases, the girl comes with it).

Perhaps it might help to compare it to my least favourite, Thirty-Nothing. What annoyed me about that was that I could very clearly see the ending from the first few pages. You've all seen or read stories like that, where absolutely everyone know who's going to get together, and it's just the very frustrating case of waiting for the two main characters to stop being idiots. That kind of scenario also shows up in Vince and Joy, and to some extent in Ralph's Party. While A Friend of the Family does include a bit of waiting for people to stop being idiots, at least Gervase is there to tell them that.

There's one element that did rather annoy me about the book. When one character becomes pregnant, she says that five years ago, she would have got an abortion. But, as an engaged woman in her early thirties, she doesn't have that option. Well, why not?

Later on, she also asks "Why would be propose if he didn't want babies?". Well, there are a number of responses to that - because he wanted to marry you being the most obvious.