Come As You Are

About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

p. 1998

While staying at someone else’s house, I raided their teenage daughter’s bookshelf for something that struck my fancy and came up with Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. Since I was only there for the weekend, and I’m too lazy to track the book down elsewhere, out of necessity, I read this book in a single day. I specify the ‘necessity’ because, while I liked it, it’s not exactly a book I’d describe as ‘a constant page turner.’ I could have put it down, and would have, if it had been in my possession, because the speed at which I read makes me unfit to read 300 page books in a single day, but I wanted to finish it in one go, so I did. The simplicity and flow of Hornby's language thankfully allowed me to do so.

About a Boy is my second outing with Nick Hornby. Earlier this year, the first book on my 2014 roster was his earlier novel, High Fidelity, and you can really see the similarities. One of About a Boy’s two primary protagonists, Will, might as well be the same person as High Fidelity’s Rob (both likely extensions of Hornby himself), and in fact they do exist in the same universe, as Will refers to Rob’s record shop, Championship Vinyl.

Will is a 36-year-old bachelor who is content with his freewheeling, childless, unattached ways, who decides that a great new way to meet women is to target single mothers. He does this by going to single parent groups and posing as a single father, fabricating a child and a life to go with it, in order to get closer to women. It almost works, but backfires when, instead of meeting women, Will finds himself saddled Marcus Brewer, the 12-year-old son of Fiona, a depressed single mother to whom Will is not attracted. Early in the novel, Fiona attempts to kill herself by swallowing a bunch of pills, and Will is present when Marcus stumbles upon the aftermath. While Fiona has her ups and downs, Marcus realizes he has to do a bit of growing up on his own, and sets out to hook Will up with his mother, so that she is not so alone and Marcus has a male figure in his life outside of his estranged father.

Marcus and Will’s friendship develops over much of the book, the point of view alternating between the two. Marcus continues to show up on Will’s doorstep, despite the latter’s reluctance and his mother’s downright rejection of their unusual friendship. A subplot involving Marcus’s infatuation with a teenaged punk, Ellie, who is in love with Nirvana singer, Kurt Cobain, and thinks Marcus is a funny/weird little boy, is the catalyst for the novel’s climax, colliding with Marcus’s dilemma with his mother in ways that are predictable to the reader, but not to the characters, of course.

Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, in a weird way, are an element of this novel that sort of possess it. For the reader, it sets us in a specific timeline, so I can see why references to it are left out of the 2002 movie version and this year’s 2014 TV show. To them, it would seem anachronistic and unfitting for the characters. Unfortunately, the alignment with the novel’s main events sort of guide the characters to realizations about themselves, so it’s a shame that element was lost. I guess that’s what you get when you guide a novel based on pop culture of the time; the TV version will just have to find another way to tell the story. [On an inconsequential side note, I unknowingly read this novel exactly one week before the 20 year anniversary of Cobain’s suicide.]

About a Boy is a title with more than one meaning. It’s supposedly a reference to Nirvana’s song, “About a Girl,” it’s ostensibly about a boy—Marcus—and his coming of age tale, but it’s also about the maturation of a much older ‘boy,’ Will himself, who realizes through the precocious Marcus that he has a lot of growing up to do himself. Young Marcus often seems like the smartest person in the room, as the adults he is surrounded by can’t seem to get it together. It’s a bit of a cliché, but not unwelcome. Adults and their problems must seem really incomprehensible to kids; sometimes a child’s simplicity is all we need to reevaluate our opinions.

Thanks to Marcus, what everyone comes to realize is that life is too complicated to do it alone. As a strange, friendly but bullied boy, Marcus had no choice but to fly solo his first twelve years. Will and Fiona and Ellie and the others do have a choice, but choose to alienate themselves. About a Boy teaches us that all we really need in life is a community, someone to rely on, someone to be there when someone else is not, because life will be hard, no matter how you try to insulate yourself from its troubles, but it’s a hell of a lot easier when someone’s sitting next to you.

What Really Matters is What You Like, Not What You Are Like

High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
p. 1995

My first full book of 2014 is Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, the story of Rob, a guy in his mid-thirties who owns a record shop and has just been dumped by his long-term girlfriend, Laura. This latest in a long series of rejections in Rob’s life sends him on an internalized tailspin that eventually leads to contacting his top five exes in a quest to figure out what exactly went wrong in his life.

High Fidelity is my first foray into Nick Hornby’s work and I suspect I will be seeking out more. Hornby has a refreshing style—hilarious and relatable. Rob Fleming is a fantastic protagonist, too, even when I want to strangle him, and I wanted to strangle him a lot. That’s just the thing, Rob is not a perfect person, far from it, but he possesses this strangely pathetic self-loathing that is just too perfectly realized to not be relatable. Sure, maybe we haven’t messed things up as poorly as Rob has done—or maybe we’ve done worse—either way, Rob’s downward spiral, though at times cringe-worthy, is wholly engaging. You want to see Rob’s road to self-realization, you want to see if he’ll actually get there, because if someone as screwed up and self-centered as Rob Fleming can make peace with himself, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

High Fidelity is definitely a dated story. Obviously the idea of owning a profitable record shop in this day and age is laughable, even more so than it was a couple decades ago, but for the more obvious reason that the technology has become obsolete. The resolution—Rob’s reentry into the world of deejaying—also kind of falls flat by today’s standards, though maybe it wasn’t so laughable when it was written. 

More importantly, Rob and his record store cohorts (which he can barely call friends, though they’re probably the best ones he’s got) cram every minute of this novel with pop culture references and being a good two and a half decades younger than Rob and his friends, I understandably failed to comprehend most of them. You can pretty much guess at their meaning based on context, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve missed out on something—like someone is purposefully making references that go over my head while I’m standing in the room.

At the story’s start, Rob is of the mentality that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” This thinking is, of course, erroneous, but not far off from the things that dictate our pop-saturated culture today. It would be interesting to see what Rob would look like if his story were taking place right now, but no doubt he wouldn’t get three pages without being declared the biggest ‘hipster’ alive and the story would get buried unless it took the parody route and played Rob off like a tool. The only reason this story—and Rob as a protagonist—works is because it was written before ‘hipster’ entered the vernacular and thus lost all meaning.

For all the story’s faults, its dialogue was realistic and its style was catchy and you can’t help but feel for Rob in spite of his faults. When Laura’s dad passes away after a long illness and she tearfully calls Rob up (initiating their slow drift back into each other's orbit), Rob’s monologue when receiving the news is one of my favorite bits in the story:

“I think about people dying all the time, but they’re always people connected with me. I’ve thought about how I would feel if Laura died, and how Laura would feel if I died, and how I’d feel if my mum or dad died, but I never thought about Laura’s mum or dad dying. I wouldn’t, would I? And even though he was ill for the entire duration of my relationship with Laura, it never really bothered me: it was more like, my dad’s got a beard, Laura’s dad’s got angina. I never thought it would actually lead to anything. Now he’s gone, of course, I wish... what? What do I wish? That I’d been nicer to him? I was perfectly nice to him, the few times we met. That we’d been closer? He was me common-law father-in-law, and we were very different, and he was sick, and... we were as close as we needed to be. You’re supposed to wish things when people die, to fill yourself full of regrets, to give yourself a hard time for all your mistakes and omissions, and I’m doing all that as best I can. It’s just that I can’t find any mistakes and omissions. He was my ex-girlfriend’s dad, you know? What am I supposed to feel?”

The end of the story implies that Rob has become a better person through the experience of reconnecting with his exes; I’m not certain I agree with that, and the final state of his relationship with Laura feels off to me, but I kind of like that it’s hard to decide if Rob’s really a changed man or not. It gives the story some ambiguity and makes you really think about how you’d have handled it all in his shoes.

I remember seeing the John Cusack film version of this years back and kind of liking it, and in celebration of reading this book, I watched it again, only this time I kind of hated it. I think it was a poor adaptation of this book. They got most of the action right, and Cusack is actually the perfect choice to play Rob, but the whole thing felt a lot less charming than the book. Maybe it’s the conversion trip across the ocean that did it, maybe it was the script or acting, or something else. The book just feels more genuine.