About a Boy

"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 as unhappy in the way that John and Christine were making themselves unhappy."

Thirty-six-year-old Will, who is also a misfit amongst his peers, refuses to accept that he should fall into the acceptable pattern of having a committed relationship and a family. He equates responsibility with unhappiness, a belief that changes over the course of the novel. 

"What was there to laugh at? Not much, really, unless you were the kind of person who was on permanent lookout for something to laugh at. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of person most kids were in his experience. They patrolled up and down school corridors like sharks, except 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." 

Marcus judges that the fault lies with those who laugh at him, rather than with himself. It is his peers' propensity to look out for differences, and not the differences themselves, that is the problem. At this stage in the novel, Marcus adopts Fiona's belief that people who judge on appearances are superficial. 

"Children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none. Maybe children democratised beautiful single women."

Will decides that if he focuses on single mothers, he will always date very attractive women because the children would function as a deterrent to his competitors. This attitude reveals Will's immaturity, shallowness, and selfishness. 

"It did occur to Will that there were few adult males better equipped than him to deal with a teenager (if that is what Marcus was - it was hard to tell. He had a strange frizzy brush of hair, and he dressed like a twenty-five-year-old chartered accountant on his day off)." 

Will recognizes his own resemblance to a teenager, albeit obliquely, by thinking that his sports and musical tastes automatically qualify him to deal with someone Marcus’s age. Will is, however, thrown because Marcus appears to have bypassed adolescence and become the embodiment of adult maturity. Will's struggle to know what to make of Marcus indicates that he is going beyond his comfort zone. 

"What got him about this was that there wasn't even anything very shocking, just some puke and some shouting, and he could see his mum wasn't dead or anything. But it was the scariest thing he'd ever seen, by a million miles, and he knew the moment he walked in that it was something he'd have to think about forever." 

The sight of Fiona collapsed on the sofa after her suicide attempt is formative for Marcus, who has never seen anything so terrifying in his life. Although he could be tempted to push the disturbing image out of his mind, he knows it will haunt him forever and that he will always have to worry about his mother's mental health. 

"You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble anymore. Will bought his clothes and his CDs and his cars and his Heal's furniture and his drugs for himself, and himself alone. If Fiona couldn't afford these things, and didn't have an equivalent bubble of her own, then that was her lookout." 

This passage shows how Will draws comfort and a sense of protection from his material possessions and does not rely on other people. He judges that if Fiona cannot afford to create her bubble in the same way, it is her own loss. This is Will's self-justification for leaving the hospital and not doing more to help Fiona. 

"His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour."

Will copes with his enormous amount of free time by dividing the day into half-hour units of time, then filling each unit with leisure activities, such as watching television, shopping, or reading the paper. His fear of commitment or becoming immersed in something is shown by the way he finds devoting himself to an activity for a whole hour "intimidating." 

"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." 

Will is overwhelmed by the consequences of his plan to join SPAT and meet single mothers. He imagined he would visit the world of single mothers and their offspring and leave whenever he chose. However, he lacked the foresight to predict that the inhabitants of that world could intrude on his own. At this stage in the novel, Will still clings to his identity as a lone ranger. 

"He could give her a reason. It wouldn't be the right reason and he'd feel bad saying it, and he was pretty sure it would make her cry. But it was a good reason, a reason that would shut her up, and if that was how you had to win arguments, then he'd use it." 

When Marcus wants to win the argument of being allowed to go to Will's house, he summons the best reason he can think of to make Fiona feel guilty. In this passage, Marcus puts his own needs before Fiona's. It is so important for him to go to Will's that he is willing to make his depressive mother cry. This marks a turning point in the novel, as Marcus is beginning to think for himself. 

"He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were a kind of guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?"

Will, who has long blocked himself from feeling anything real, enjoys experiencing anger and pain vicariously. He is so far removed from real pain that immersing himself in it is almost a novelty. 

"It was then, for the first time, that Will 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." 

In a reversal of the usual status quo, a grown man must teach a child how to be a child and survive at school. While Fiona has instructed Marcus in how to be a responsible citizen, he is missing the skills and knowledge that enable him to engage with his peers. Will, who has not matured beyond adolescence and has been an adolescent for about two and a half decades, is therefore the expert who can help Marcus. 

"Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it happened to friends it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete." 

Will believes that falling in love is a failure because it is a declaration that one's self and possessions are not enough. The reliance on another person for happiness terrifies Will, as he is used to a lifetime of self-reliance and selfishness. 

"If there was a disadvantage to the life he had chosen for himself, a life without work and care and difficulty and detail, a life without context and texture, then he had found it: when he met an intelligent, cultured, ambitious, beautiful, witty and single woman he felt like a blank twit." 

Will's desire for Rachel to fancy him reveals the disadvantage to the carefree life he has chosen. Next to Rachel, with all her attributes and stories, he feels like an uninteresting blank page. The life he has curated to be free from strife and pain actually makes him a boring dating prospect.

"I want to be with her all the time, instead of just when I bump into her. And I want to tell her things first, before I tell anyone, even you or Mum. And I don't want her to have another boyfriend. If I could have all those things, I wouldn't mind if I touched her or not."

Marcus’s as-yet prepubescent notion of his love for Ellie teaches Will something profound about intimacy. It is not just sex and touching, as Will has thought, but the sharing of thoughts, feelings, and secrets. Marcus’s notion of intimacy requires Will to be more vulnerable. 

"Rachel lived just up the road from Camden Lock, in a tall, thin house full of books and old furniture and sepia photographs of dramatic, romantic Eastern European relatives, and for a moment Will was grateful that his flat and her house would never get a chance to meet. Her house would be warm and welcoming, and his would be cocky and cool, and he'd be ashamed of it." 

Rachel's house, which functions as an extension of herself, shows the lack of story and personalization in Will's dwelling. While he had once been so proud of his modern, cool place, his admiration of Rachel's welcoming home makes him feel inadequate. 

"Suddenly Marcus could see why people like Rachel and Suzie—nice, attractive women who you thought wouldn't give someone like that the time of day - might like Will. He had gone into this way of looking that he never used on Marcus: there was something in his eyes, a kind of softness that Marcus could see would really work." 

It is through Marcus’s perspective that the reader understands why Will is appealing to women. Marcus notices that Will's eyes play a special trick that makes him appear empathetic and convinces women that he is more attractive than he actually is. Marcus noticing this indicates that he wants to learn how to be appealing to girls. 

"But Rachel simply sat there and waited for him to finish his mouthful, and however much he chewed and grimaced and swallowed and choked he couldn't make a mini spring roll last forever. So he told her the truth, as he knew he would, and she was appalled, as she had every right to be." 

Hornby successfully conveys the awkwardness of Will's confession to Rachel. Will capitalizes on the chewiness of the spring roll to delay the agonizing moment of truth, then he finally has to surrender to the consequences of his lie about Marcus being his son. Rachel watching and waiting for Will to tell his story indicates that she is in a position of power and will not let him squirm out of his responsibility. 

"The way Will saw it, the reason that some of the people at SPAT were in a state wasn't because they had kids - their problems had started earlier than that, when they first fell for someone and made themselves vulnerable. Now Will had done the same and, as far as he was concerned, he deserved all he got. He'd be singing with eyes closed soon, and there was nothing he could do about it."

Will considers that the source of all trouble is vulnerability. He feels that his newfound passion for Rachel stands to make him as pathetic as some of the SPAT women who had been taken advantage of by their partners. He worries that he will soon resemble Fiona, who is so emotional that she sings with her eyes closed. 

"They didn't talk about anything for a while. They just sat on the pipes together, moving their bottoms when they got too hot, and waited until they felt like going back out into the world." 

This passage, which describes Marcus and Ellie huddling together in the boys' bathroom, is a picture of adolescent intimacy. Wordlessly, and without touching, Ellie and Marcus comfort each other. Both the bathroom and their relationship are safe spaces that temporarily provide respite from the wider world. 

"People like Fiona ruined really pissed him off. They ruined it for everyone. It wasn't easy, floating on the surface of everything: it took skill and nerve, and when people told you that they were thinking of taking their own life, you could feel yourself being dragged under with them. Keeping your head above water was what it was all about, Will reckoned." 

Will's frustration with Fiona, who is in her own world of suicidal darkness and blind to reality, masks his fear of being dragged down to her depths of misery. His unconscious worry that Fiona's predicament is contagious underpins his desire to avoid her. 

"The problem was that Ellie wasn't exactly a guided missile. You couldn't guide her. Out in the world, where there were no walls and rules, she was scary. She could just blow up in his face any time." 

Stuck in the train with a manic Ellie, Marcus is suddenly afraid. He realizes that the girl who once seemed to be his friend is now explosive and terrifying. He considers that she could even inflict harm on him, as his mother can.

"He didn't want to sleep with Fiona, but he did want her to feel better, and he hadn't realised that in order to make her feel better he had to act in exactly the same way as if he did want to sleep with her. He didn't want to think about what that meant." 

Will discovers that the way to make Fiona better is to treat her with the interest and consideration of a woman he intends to seduce. The idea of offering disinterested help to someone of the opposite sex is so novel that Will has to reframe it in terms that are familiar to him.

"Maybe Ellie was like Will. If either of them had real trouble in their lives, they wouldn't want or need to invent it for themselves, or put pictures of it on the walls."

Marcus considers that Ellie and Will, with their seemingly problem-free lives, are fascinated with trouble, addiction, and tragedy. However, as someone who has experienced the darkness of having a suicidal mother, he cannot recognize the glamour in courting or celebrating trouble. This quality makes him mature beyond his years.