By Nick Hornby
Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the Nineteen Nineties. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is single, hyper-concerned together with his coolness quotient, and blithely dwelling off his father's novelty-song royalties. Will sees himself as completely missing in hidden depths--and he's pleased with it! the single difficulty is, his pals are succumbing to duties and kids, and he's more and more passed over within the chilly. How can a person brilliantly built for meaningless relationships make sure that he'll proceed to fulfill attractive Julie Christie-like girls and confirm that they'll throw him over prior to issues get too profound? a quick stumble upon with a unmarried mom units Will off on his new occupation, that of "serial great guy." so far as he's concerned--and have in mind, quandary isn't his robust suit--he's the ideal seize for the younger mom at the move. After an interlude of sexual bliss, she'll discover that her baby isn't prepared for a guy of their existence and may can journey off into the Highgate sundown, the place extra damsels it sounds as if anticipate. the single seize is that how one can meet those girls is at single-parent get-togethers. in a single of Nick Hornby's many hilarious (and embarrassing) scenes, Will falls into a few critical misrepresentation at SPAT ("Single Parents--Alone Together"), passing himself off as a bereft unmarried dad: "There used to be, he concept, an emotional fact right here someplace, and he might see now that his role-playing had a formerly unsuspected creative point to it. He used to be appearing, definite, yet within the noblest, so much profound experience of the word."
What interferes with Will's occupation arc, in fact, is reality--in the form of a 12-year-old boy who's in lots of methods his polar contrary. For Marcus, cool isn't even available, not to mention a subject. For starters, he's a sufferer at his new tuition. issues at domestic are beautiful lousy, too, because his musical therapist mom turns out more and more short of treatment herself. All Marcus can do is cobble jointly info with a mix of incomprehension, innocence, self-blame, and unfettered transparent sight. As fanatics of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity already comprehend, Hornby's perception into laddishness magically combines the intense and the hilarious. About a Boy keeps his singular exam of masculine wish-fulfillment and worry. This time, notwithstanding, the writer we could ladies and kids onto the taking part in box, forcing his feckless hero to jump over a wholly new--and completely welcome--set of emotional hurdles.
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Extra resources for About a Boy
Sample text
It was bad enough that they had children in the first place; why did they wish to compound the original error by encouraging their friends to do the same? For some years now Will had been convinced that it was possible to get through life without having to make yourself unhappy in the way that John and Christine were making themselves unhappy (and he was sure they were unhappy, even if they had achieved some peculiar, brain-washed state that prevented them from recognizing their own unhappiness).
They patrolled up and down school corridors like sharks, except that what they were on the lookout for wasn’t flesh but the wrong trousers, or the wrong haircut, or the wrong shoes, any or all of which sent them wild with excitement. As he was usually wearing the wrong shoes or the wrong trousers, and his haircut was wrong all the time, every day of the week, he didn’t have to do very much to send them all demented. Marcus knew he was weird, and he knew that part of the reason he was weird was because his mum was weird.
He was trawling through the racks while she was being served, so he never caught a glimpse of her face, but he saw a lot of honey-blond hair, and he heard the kind of vaguely husky voice that he and everyone else thought of as sexy, so he listened while she explained that her niece didn’t even know who Pinky and Perky were. ‘Don’t you think that’s terrible? Fancy being five and not knowing who Pinky and Perky are! ’ She was trying to be jolly, but Will had learnt to his cost that jollity was frowned upon in Championship Vinyl.