About a Boy was published by Victor Gollancz in 1998, adapted into a 2002 film starring Hugh Grant and a television series. The novel extended Hornby’s exploration of male immaturity into darker territory: High Fidelity’s Rob was emotionally stunted but functional; Will Freeman has constructed his entire life as a system for avoiding responsibility, connection, and growth.
Will is thirty-six and has never worked: his father wrote a novelty Christmas song (“Santa’s Super Sleigh”) that generates enough royalty income to fund an idle, pleasant, entirely empty life. He fills his days with units of time (a haircut = one unit, watching Countdown = half a unit) and his evenings with casual relationships that end the moment they threaten to become serious.
Then Marcus appears: a twelve-year-old whose mother has attempted suicide, who is bullied at school for being weird (he sings aloud in the corridor, wears the wrong clothes, says the wrong things), and who needs an adult who is not depressed, not overwhelmed, and not incapable of functioning. Marcus attaches himself to Will — not as a father figure but as an ally, someone who understands the modern world (music, clothes, social rules) in ways his mother cannot.
The novel’s comedy comes from the mismatch (Will, who has been avoiding adulthood, forced to perform it for a child who desperately needs it), but its emotional power comes from the recognition that both characters need the other: Marcus needs Will’s worldliness; Will needs Marcus’s demand that he become a person rather than a lifestyle.
Collecting About a Boy
First edition (Victor Gollancz, London, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $20–$60
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- US first (Riverhead, 1998): $10–$25
- Without jacket: $5–$10