Steven Wu's Book Reviews: About a Boy (Nick Hornby)

About a Boy is Nick Hornby's trifling and somewhat forgettable little novel about two boys: the 12-year-old actual boy Marcus, and the 36-year-old boy-at-heart Will. Will is a superficial bachelor who lives the easy life due to royalties from his songwriter father's one hit, an insufferable Christmas tune that he despises. Marcus is a preternaturally mature young boy whose bluntness, worldliness, and general oddness alternately bemuse and frighten his depressive mother, Fiona. The three of them come together in fairly random fashion, go through ups and downs, and leave us at the end of the novel slightly more grown up, but with hardly anything resembling closure.

Nick Hornby writes in a style that I initially found glib, but later thought of as plain spoken, unpretentious, and straightforward. It's not beautiful writing, but, rather, just barely functional, with a constant undercurrent of understated wit and a few flashes of genuine humor. With such spare writing, it falls to Hornby's story and characters to really give any weight to this book. And the truth is that they don't quite. The story of About a Boy is meandering and slight, absent any real passions (with the exception of one harrowing, central scene involving Fiona). The characters, also, felt inert: strangely so, as I thought that the premise of this whole book was Will's growing up, Marcus's opening up, and Fiona's ascent from darkness. A little bit of each of those happens, but not a lot. And the characters keep enough distance between each other that their relationships feel a bit cool.

This is not to say that Hornby does anything actually wrong in About a Boy. The book doesn't purport to be anything more than a realistic slice of life, and at that it is superb. But the slice of life that Hornby subjects to his relentless realism is rather narrow and rather pallid. It doesn't really resonate, I think, unless the reader's background makes him or her identify with one of the characters. The problem, of course, is that I'm not a precocious child, a flighty middle-aged bachelor, or a depressed single mother; nor do I know many people like that. And About a Boy doesn't do much to draw me into their lives. Don't get me wrong: About a Boy is an amusing, well written, and well crafted book. But it is also, as I said at the outset, just a trifle.