The real deal

‘“We weren’t phoney,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents’ generation. We wanted to make it real.”’ Such is the lifelong aspiration of Stephen Newman, the baby boomer hero of Linda Grant’s new novel.

‘“We weren’t phoney,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents’ generation. We wanted to make it real.”’ Such is the lifelong aspiration of Stephen Newman, the baby boomer hero of Linda Grant’s new novel. As ambitions go, it’s fairly modest. He doesn’t want to scale Everest or found a business empire or sleep with a lot of beautiful women. But making it real (whatever that may mean) turns out to be rather harder than he had bargained for.

We Had It So Good sets out to define a generation, coming emblazoned with the slogan: ‘From the writer who illuminates our times like no other.’ It charts Stephen’s progress from the Los Angeles of his childhood to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford in the 1960s, where he meets his future wife Andrea, before taking up residence in an anarchist London squat in the 1970s. Then it’s on to work and property ownership. Andrea becomes a psychotherapist, while Stephen has a producing job making science documentaries at the BBC. There is a house in Islington, two children, plenty of friends, even the odd dinner party at which Tony and Cherie Blair are among the guests.

Along the way, certain anecdotes become ossified: the one about sharing petits-fours on the boat from America with a fellow Rhodes scholar, the young Bill Clinton; the one about their first child being conceived in Highgate cemetery, under the statue of Karl Marx.