About a Boy is
about two boys actually. There is the obvious one:
Marcus, a 12-year-old misfit recently transplanted by his depressed
single mother from Cambridge to London, where he is friendless and
mercilessly taunted by classmates at his new school. And there is
36-year-old Will, whose ability to have mature relationships never
developed.
Will seemingly is happily unattached, keeping each girlfriend only to
the point when she wants more from him. He has never had to work,
drawing an easy £40,000 a year from royalties from
his late father's one hit song. He spends his days enjoying daytime TV,
going to the local shops, tidying his expensively applianced bachelor
flat, and keeping up the trappings of coolness. When Will's nice-guy
act deceives a single mother, who worries that he wants more than a
fling, he decides single mothers might be the perfect dates. In one of
the book's hilarious incidents, he is the sole male at a meeting of
SPAT (Single Parents — Alone Together), lovingly discussing
his made-up son Ned. Through one of the SPAT members Will meets Marcus,
the son of the woman's friend Fiona. Marcus starts showing up at Will's
place every afternoon after school and at first is an unwelcome
intrusion, but the two gradually bond. Will teaches Marcus how to be
cool — to wear the right shoes and listen to the right music.
Marcus — not necessarily consciously — teaches Will
that real relationships are messy, but he can't shut himself off from
them. By the end the boys are growing not only in their relationship
with one another but also in their relationships with other people.
This was the second novel by Hornby to explore the weaknesses of
contemporary males. Both it and the first, High Fidelity
(1995), were adapted into films. Hornby later wrote How to Be Good
(2001), which won the W. H. Smith Award for
Fiction, and A
Long Way Down (2005), which was shortlisted for the 2005
Whitbread Novel Award and a 2006 Commonweath Writers Prize.
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