On Wednesdays when Emilia looks after this pint-size know-all she repeatedly screws up abusing his lactose intolerance with dairy products

On Wednesdays, when Emilia looks after this pint-size know-all, she repeatedly screws up, abusing his lactose intolerance with dairy products and accidentally knocking him into the freezing-cold Harlem Meer in Central Park.
Carolyn (the glamorous first wife) informs her and half of Manhattan that she should be arrested for child abuse, while Emilia rages at her father for betraying her mother with a teenage Russian stripper. But her descriptions of Central Park sensitively mirror Emilia’s depression: trees “poke at the dreary sky with lifeless branches that have lost not just their leaves, but the very hope of leaves”.For all its slickness, this novel has poignant moments – Emilia lactating at her baby’s funeral; William, caught in the crossfire of an adult row, standing “hands balled up in fists and pressed into his cheeks”. Best of all is her depiction of Carolyn, tyrannising Jack and Emilia with her phone calls and exploding into emotional meltdown when her son fails – at five – to get into a top school.Occasionally Waldman’s writing seems journalistic, over-using repetition to stress a point Shes fond, too, of one-liners. She is playfully astute about cliquey professional moms dressed in “crumpled comfort at a four-figure price”, the sister with a social conscience whose thermostat is set at 62 degrees and whose friends are “meticulously assorted and multihued” and the Croatian nanny who speaks impeccable English, but only in the present tense. However, Waldman tells it with a wittiness and pace which never slacken. Emilia is suffering from the recent cot death of her own baby, and William is doing a fine job of reminding her that “not only am I not his mother but I am nobody’s mother at all.”Stuffed with screamy emotions and deep feelings, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits builds to a predictable Hollywood ending.

Yet Love And Other Impossible Pursuits, a novel about family life, comes charged with an author history difficult to ignore. The worthy books that we felt required to keep had been discarded in favour of guilty pleasures. The Pan Books of Horror, Spider-Man and The Films of Norman Wisdom had inexplicably been deemed more valuable than Proust. Ultimately, the new truncated library that emerged was every bit as idiosyncratic – perhaps more so – than the old one, and a damned sight more enjoyable.. You shouldn’t judge a book by its mother.

“Look, how to make macram?ot-holders for Empire Day.”I noticed I was hanging on to some very strange choices. “I’m keeping The Origin of Species because Americans are advocating Intelligent Design and we need it to counterbalance the Bible,” said Pete. Friends became involved, poking through crates of discarded books in dismay “You’re abandoning your identity,” one warned “These books are what make you you. Nobody else I know has all 10 volumes of the Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopedia.” She leafed through one. J G Ballard and Flann O’Brien survived, Larry Niven and James Joyce went “You can buy Iain M Banks anywhere,” I pointed out. “We should only keep the harder-to-find books.” “By that criteria we’ll be keeping plenty of your own novels,” came the terse reply.We dug in our heels about touchstone texts. I kept Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday but released The Napoleon of Notting Hill, saved a place for Hamilton’s Hangover Square but bid adieu to Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky.