About a Boy

Will Freeman

Will Freeman has no job. His father wrote a Christmas song in the 1950s that became a perennial — two bars of melody that plays every December in every shop in Britain — and the royalties are sufficient. Will is 36. He watches television, buys things, has short-term relationships with women who want more than he will give, and has constructed a life in which nothing is required of him.

His theory: human beings are islands. Self-sufficiency is achievable and desirable. He has no relationship with children and wants none.

Marcus

Marcus Brewer is twelve, unstylish, unselfconscious, and capable of singing along to his mother Fiona’s folk music in public without apparent awareness that this is social suicide. His mother is depressed in ways that are approaching clinical. He is trying to manage her.

Will and Marcus meet through Will’s fictional son Ned, who was invented to enable Will to attend SPAT meetings and meet women. Marcus sees through this immediately but continues to involve Will in his life because Will is the first adult he has encountered who is not entirely swamped by their own needs. The friendship that follows is the novel’s subject.

The 2002 film with Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult is one of the best British literary adaptations of its decade.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set About a Boy apart: The dual-narrative structure — alternating between Will and Marcus — is perfectly calibrated throughout; Will’s philosophical commitment to non-involvement is one of Hornby’s sharpest comic inventions; and The novel’s emotional warmth is earned rather than imposed — the friendship develops convincingly. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of About a Boy give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Adulthood cannot be entirely avoided — it arrives through the needs of others even when you have organised your life to prevent it. An island is not a stable configuration for a human being — Will’s self-sufficiency is a defence that works until it fails. Friendship between a child and an adult is possible when both parties are operating in arrested development. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Nick Hornby’s prose in About a Boy is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The resolution is somewhat tidy given the complexity of Marcus’s family situation. Some find Will’s voice less interesting than Rob Fleming’s in High Fidelity. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Literary comedy readers who enjoyed High Fidelity and want Hornby’s warmest novel, and anyone interested in comic portraits of voluntary immaturity.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Hornby’s warmest novel; the Will-Marcus friendship is genuinely touching.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Nick Hornby
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby — Full Review
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen — Full Review

Publication and the Film

About a Boy was published in 1998 by Victor Gollancz and was adapted as a film in 2002, directed by Chris and Paul Weitz, with Hugh Grant as Will Freeman and Nicholas Hoult as Marcus. The film was a considerable commercial success — Grant’s first major film role after a period in which his off-screen behaviour had damaged his career — and was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. It brought significantly wider attention to Nick Hornby’s work outside Britain, where his previous novels Fever Pitch and High Fidelity were already bestsellers.

Hornby and the “New Lad” Novel

Hornby’s first three novels — Fever Pitch (1992), High Fidelity (1995), and About a Boy — established and then interrogated what was called the “new lad” genre: fiction narrated by men in their thirties who are emotionally underdeveloped, obsessive about popular culture, and resistant to the demands of adult relationships. About a Boy is the most self-critical of the three: Will Freeman’s entire lifestyle is premised on avoiding responsibility, and the novel is structured as the education of a man who has to be forced into connection with another human being by circumstances rather than by any internal desire to change. The novel’s ending — which resolves Will’s isolation through his relationship with Marcus without pretending that Will has become a different kind of person — reflects Hornby’s characteristic formal intelligence: the emotional trajectory is earned without being falsified.

Film Adaptation

The 2002 film adaptation, directed by Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz, starred Hugh Grant as Will and Nicholas Hoult as Marcus. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Hugh Grant’s performance as Will Freeman — affable, emotionally avoidant, and gradually compelled toward connection despite himself — is often cited as his most satisfying comic dramatic role, giving him scope beyond the romantic-comedy persona he had established in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

The 2002 film directed by Chris and Paul Weitz starred Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult; it marked a turn in Grant’s career toward more emotionally complex roles and introduced Hoult, who was twelve at filming, to an international audience. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.