Will is 36 and too young for his age; Marcus is 12 and way, way too old for his. Will wears serious threads, listens to Snoop Doggy Dogg and earns a lot of money for doing absolutely nothing, thanks to the royalties from an outrageously successful Christmas song composed, once upon a time, by his dear, deceased old Dad. Marcus wears baggy jumpers, sings along to his mum's Janis Joplin records and thinks that Kurt Cobain plays for Manchester United. Will doesn't see the point of kids - until he has a brief but incandescent fling with a single mother who looks like Julie Christie. And then inspiration strikes. "When had he ever been out with a woman who looked like Julie Christie? People who looked like Julie Christie didn't go out with people like him. They went out with other film stars, or peers of the realm, or Formula One drivers. What was happening here? He decided that children were what was happening here; that children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none . . . Single mothers - bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them, all over London - were the best invention Will had ever heard of."
But Will has a problem. Single men and single mothers just don't move in the same social circles; in fact, single mothers don't move in any social circles, as far as he can see. So in order to gain access to this vast pool of desirable womanhood, Will joins a single parents' support group and invents for himself a cruel ex-wife and a two-year-old son. Far from becoming involved with a stream of Julie Christie lookalikes, however, Will ends up getting involved - very involved - with the hapless Marcus and his unstable mother.
What is often forgotten, amid all the style-conscious, post-modern, new-lad hype which has decreed that Hornby is one of the coolest people on the planet, is that the boy can actually write. In Fever Pitch he articulated the inarticulate, channelling the wordless roar of the terraces at Highbury into a philosophy with which every British football fan, even those who couldn't stand the idea of Arsenal Football Club, could empathise. In High Fidelity he made words from music, weaving a warm and witty story around a record collection. About a Boy is an amiable, enjoyable rite-of-passage novel which plays the stereotypes of youth off against those of middle age, and which contains all the clever one-liners, sharp observation and general jokey bits you'd expect, but a lot of unexpected, surprising stuff as well; fans of the earlier two books may well be unnerved by the exploration of themes such as loneliness, dysfunctional families, friendship and suicide. If Hornby were a rock star, this might well be described as "the difficult third album"; me, I'll stick with the football metaphor, and award him a hat-trick.
Why? Well, for his portrayal of the delicate - at times, almost non-existent - relationship between Marcus and Will, an unlikely partnership if ever there was one, and for saying the things nobody else will say about the misery of trying to bring up kids, especially teenage kids, on your own. But more than anything, for putting on to paper, in a coherent and ultimately sympathetic way, the thoughts of a troubled teenager. We all know teenagers like Marcus; we'd all like to learn how to love them but, like Will, we'd all prefer to walk away. About a Boy is really about the awful, confused, hilarious, embarrassing place where children and adults meet, and Hornby has captured it with delightful precision.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist.
