About a Boy

Will Freeman, thirty six, lives entirely off the royalties from a single Christmas novelty song his father wrote decades earlier and has arranged his life around having no responsibilities whatsoever, including inventing a fictional two year old son so he can join a single parents' support group purely to meet women. Through the group he meets Suzie and, through her, twelve year old Marcus Brewer, an awkward, unpopular boy whose mother Fiona, a depressive folk singer, attempts suicide early in the novel, an event that leaves Marcus quietly convinced he needs to look after her and gradually drags Will into functioning as an unlikely second parent. Will teaches Marcus which trainers and music will make him less of a target at school, exchanges Marcus does not always want but comes to need, while Marcus's persistent, guileless honesty slowly costs Will his own careful defenses against caring about anyone. A crisis involving Marcus's mother, and separately Will's pursuit of a single mother named Rachel, brings several storylines together at a police station before the book settles into its quiet final scene: Marcus, who once shared his mother's devotion to Joni Mitchell, shrugs her music off as something he has grown out of, and that small, ordinary piece of teenage dismissiveness is the proof, for Will as much as for the reader, that the boy no longer needs saving from himself the way he once seemed to.

Told in alternating close chapters between Will and Marcus, the book lets the reader see each character's blind spots the other cannot; it is funny in the register Hornby's readers already expected from High Fidelity, but stakes out more serious ground around depression and adolescent isolation without losing the light touch that keeps it moving quickly.