It's a bit early to say so now, but in a few years we may consider Nick Hornby the rightful heir to folks like Evelyn Waugh and David Lodge, the great
English comic novelists who used social satire in the furtherance of serious moral pursuits. In About a Boy he offers a devastating portrait of
the selfish, isolated, infantilized modern Man:
How cool was Will Freeman? This cool: he had slept with a woman he didn't know very well in the last three months (five points). He
hadn't spent more than three hundred pounds on a jacket (five points). He had spent more than twenty pounds on a haircut (five points) (How was it
possible to spend less than twenty pounds on a haircut in 1993?). He owned more than five hip-hop albums (five points). He had taken Ecstasy (five
points), but in a club and not merely at home as a sociological exercise (five bonus points). He intended to vote Labour at the next general election
(five points). He earned more than forty thousand pounds a year (five points), and he didn't have to work very hard for it (five points, and he awarded
himself an extra five points for not having to work at all for it). He had eaten in a restaurant that served polenta and shaved parmesan (five
points). He had never used a flavored condom (five points), he had sold his Bruce Springsteen albums (five points), and he had both grown a goatee
(five points) and shaved it off again (five points). The bad news was that he hadn't ever had sex with someone whose photo had appeared on
the style page of a newspaper or magazine (minus two), and he did still think, if he was honest (and if Will had anything approaching an ethical belief,
it was that lying about yourself in questionnaires was utterly wrong), that owning a fast car was likely to impress women. Even so, that gave
him...sixty-six! He was, according to the questionnaire, sub-zero! He was dry ice! He was Frosty the Snowman! He would die of hypothermia!
Will didn't know how seriously you were supposed to take these questionnaire things, but he couldn't afford to think about it; being
men's-magazine cool was as close as he had ever come to an achievement, and moments like this were to be treasured.
That's pretty pitiful; not only is his life centered around material self-gratification, but the sole measure of his life's achievements is the "pleasure" he's
brought himself.
However, when Will stumbles onto a new scam for picking up women, by pretending to be a single father and frequenting a local support group
for single parents (SPAT), he ends up getting involved in the life of a terribly awkward young boy, Marcus, a twelve year old with a suicidal mother.
Will views Marcus as little more than a prop to abet his bedding of women, but Marcus has other ideas. Marcus desperately wants to save his mother
but he recognizes that he's just a naive and very confused kid, so he needs an adult's help. Unfortunately for him, and for Will, the only adult, the
only person for that matter, other than his mom to show interest in him is Will. So he begins showing up at Will's apartment every afternoon and,
having figured out that Will was faking being a father, has sufficient blackmail material that Will's stuck with him:
When Will had conceived this fantasy and joined SPAT, he had imagined sweet little children, not children who would be able to track
him down and come to his house. He had imagined entering their world, but he hadn't foreseen that they might be able to penetrate his. He was one
of life's visitors; he didn't want to be visited.
And so, at first, Will tries to disengage himself from his unwelcome visitor, leading to a confrontation with the boy's mother, Fiona:
"[Y]ou're involved now. He keeps coming round to your house. You take him out to buy shoes. He's living this whole life I can't
control, which means you have to."
"I'm not going to control anything."
"In which case, it's best that he doesn't see you."
"We've been here before. What do you want me to do if he rings on the bell?"
"Don't let him in."
"Fine."
"I mean, if you're not prepared to think about how to help me, then keep out."
"Right."
"God, you're a selfish bastard."
"But I'm on my own. There's just me. I'm not putting myself first, because there isn't anybody else."
"Well, he's there too now. You can't just shut life out, you know."
she was wrong, he was almost positive. You could shut life out. If you didn't answer the door to it, how was it going to get in?
But their lives become even more intertwined, first because Marcus never tires of ringing on the bell, and, secondly, because, upon meeting a woman
who interests him and who happens to have a son of her own, Will pretends that Marcus is his own son.
At first, his increasing involvement with Marcus isn't too demanding, because the boy--whose hippie mother cuts his hair herself, dresses him in
near rags, requires him to eat vegetarian, and has raised him on Joni Mitchell and Roberta Flack (circa "Killing Me Softly")--is being tormented by the
other kids at school, and that's something he's actually competent to deal with:
[W]ill saw the kind of help Marcus needed. Fiona had given him the idea that Marcus was after a father figure, someone to guide him
gently towards male adulthood, but that wasn't it at all: Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult. And, unhappily for Will, that was exactly the
kind of assistance he was qualified to provide. He wasn't able to tell Marcus how to grow up, or how to cope with a suicidal mother, or anything like
that, but he could certainly tell him that Kurt Cobain didn't play for Manchester United, and for a twelve-year-old boy attending a comprehensive
school at the end of 1993, that was maybe the most important information of all.
But, perhaps inevitably, as Will and Marcus begin to bond and as Will's relationship with Rachel, once she gets over his lying about having a son,
develops too, it is Will himself who starts to be guided, sometimes not so gently, towards male adulthood. The lives he's gotten himself tangled in
turn out to be rather messy--no surprise--but also inescapable:
Life was, after all, like air. Will could have no doubt about that anymore. There seemed to be no way of keeping it out, or at a distance,
and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it. How people managed to draw it down into their lungs without choking was a mystery to
him: it was full of bits. This was air you could almost chew.
and, once he begins breathing, and gets drawn into a run-in Marcus has with the police he discovers something surprising, to him, about himself:
Will couldn't recall ever having been caught up in this sort of messy, sprawling, chaotic web before; it was almost as if he had been
given a glimpse of what it was like to be human. It wasn't too bad, really; he wouldn't even mind being human on a full-time basis.
Almost against his own wishes, the boy has grown up.
Mr. Hornby tells all this in a thoroughly engaging and very funny fashion. He manages to be both wise about the problems of modern culture
and hip to what's cool. This makes him seem less preachy than he might be otherwise, but, because he's able to differentiate between the two, he's
able to show us that to be merely cool is not, in fact, to be fully human and that a society that is so absorbed with coolness is necessarily anti-human.
That's an interesting interpretation, though completely wrong. The point is that being involved with each others' lives is messy and painful, but necessary if one is to be a real human being.
I approached "About A Boy" having first seen the movie--and I learned a great deal from the contrast. The movie, in fact, ends with a cliched "feel good about not being lonely anymore" message--but every review I have seen misses the fact that the book DOESN'T end that way. "Will Freeman" changes from someone who is quite happy to someone who is quite unhappy as the book nears it's end, and it's because he's letting someone in! At the end, Will even thinks, for the first time, about committing suicide himself! "About A Boy" cleverly deconstructs the typical "romance" by showing that each major character is happy to the degree he or she can remain isolated from others. Marcus and Fiona become more separate from each other, and Marcus becomes more separate from Ellie and Will, and those two characters end up far happier at the end of the book. Will, meanwhile, because he has fallen in love with Rachel, turns into a complete disaster--he's wretched, afraid, he loses his wit (calling Marcus "Einstein"), and he even comtemplates suicide. It's important to note that his beloved Rachel, his computer-generated perfect partner, is a RAT! Her idea of the point of life--here's the meaning of life in her eyes--is just to "not miss anything" like a TV show. On the night she spills this to a doubtful Will, they sleep together for the first time. Right afterwards, Rachel comes up with the idea of meeting Fiona to help her with her depression, and then Rachel breaks this promise, made right after she first sleeps with Will, by standing Will and Rachel up intentionally! Rachel also has a son who is a freakishly sick person who seriously threatens violent murder to Will and Marcus for intruding into Rachel's life. Will ends up the book miserable--horribly scared and lost--and in danger of his life--and when his wretched straits are pointed out to him by Marcus, Will, who had never before considered suicide (as the book makes clear in the beginning), is suddenly seized with the urge to kill Marcus and himself. Every single reviewer missed this book entirely! No one noticed the strange, sad ending--which deconstructed the typical romance. Some reviewers even chided Hornby for the fact that his book is cliched, when it was their minds that were so cliched they didn't see the book that was actually in front of them. The movie cancelled out the book's ending entirely, replacing it with something else not nearly as compelling. Take a closer look at the ending of "About a Boy"--the last few pages in particular. This book plays with the stereotypes. Most people probably thought that Hornby's powers simply failed him at the end, as the book loses humorous punch and as the English slang starts to become claustrophobic instead of clever--so they ignored the ending. Don't ignore it. It's unsettling, but it's surely intentional. This is a dark book, very bleak, very tragic, hidden behind a veneer of trendy and funny that cracks to reveal a scarred and bitter surface beneath.
