A BOY’S OWN STORY

The man of the moment in England is the forty-year-old Nick Hornby, whom the Daily Telegraph four weeks ago dubbed “the most successful British writer of his generation.” He has managed this feat in six years’ time. Hornby’s first book, Fever Pitch, made a sensation in 1992. An account of his life as a soccer fan, Fever Pitch not only sold an almost unthinkable seven- hundred-thousand copies (the equivalent of two and a half million here); it singlehandedly gave a sport associated with drunken hooligans and mob violence new respectability. According to English journalist Jane Cornwall, Hornby “ennobled the game to the point where fashion-conscious unlikely lads – – ravers, aesthetes, boffins, pop stars, women — began jostling for a place on the terraces.”

The release of his first novel, High Fidelity, in 1995 solidified Hornby’s standing. The novel sold nearly as well as Fever Pitch, received ecstatic reviews, and was (unlike Fever Pitch) published to great acclaim in the United States. Now, just having Hornby’s name on another writer’s book jacket is considered magical: His endorsement of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary launched that comic novel into the stratosphere. Even his sarcastic put-downs are considered useful. Of a novel published the first week of January 1997, Hornby wrote: “I can confidently say that this is the best book I’ve read this year.” As Alain de Botton put it in the Sunday Telegraph, “the joke was lost when it appeared on the paperback edition” published later.

British and American publishers have now simultaneously brought out Hornby’s second novel, About a Boy — following a bidding war for movie rights won by Robert De Niro’s production company for $ 3 million. In the United States, the only novelists who achieve this level of commercial success are the likes of John Grisham and Tom Clancy — and Hornby has as much in common with these genre writers as J. D. Salinger has with Margaret Mitchell.

Hornby is a comic novelist, for a start, and an uncommonly gentle one at that. His novels are in the tradition of musty, much-loved English authors like William Cooper, who turned out books in the 1950s in which the characters loaf around the bed-sit, eating mash without the bangers and worrying whether they’ll have enough ration slips to buy fags before Michaelmas. Like Cooper, Hornby will be forgotten forty years from now, his novels unreadable and dated.

But right now, in 1998, Nick Hornby is a godsend, because he manages to write books that are thoroughly entertaining even as they offer illuminating insights into “the way we live now.” This is a genuine accomplishment at a time when readers have learned to expect either entertainment or illumination from a novel, but rarely both at once.

High Fidelity, Hornby’s first novel, is the story of a London record- shop owner who begins to question his purpose in life when his live-in girlfriend leaves him. “If I lived in Bosnia,” Rob says, “then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world.” But Rob has turned thirty-five, his shop is failing, and he is no farther along than when he was in his twenties and content spending his days indulging in what David Denby once called “lowbrow scholasticism” — making lists of the top- five songs about this, or the top-five movies about that, and feeling smug and superior when somebody else’s list fails to meet Rob’s exacting standards.

The glory of High Fidelity is its prose, which is beautifully crafted while seeming utterly artless. Hornby is marvelously aphoristic: “It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.” On teenage heartbreak: “Unhappiness really meant something back then; now it’s just a drag, like having a cold or no money.” On the danger posed to society by sad songs: “People worry about kids who play with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands — literally thousands — of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”

High Fidelity is the story of a pop-culture enthusiast’s discovery that there is a world beyond songs and movies and the instant gratification they provide. Without marriage, children, or a future, Rob learns, “I’ve got no ballast, nothing to weigh me down, and if I don’t hang on, I’ll just float away.” It eventually occurs to Rob he’s still a boy: “Men don’t work in quiet, deserted streets in Holloway; they work in the City or the West End, or in factories, or down mines, or in stations or airports or offices. They work in places where other people work, and they have to fight to get there, and perhaps as a consequence they do not get the feeling that real life is going on elsewhere.”

Hornby’s About a Boy is that rare thing — a second novel that is better, richer, and more rounded than its author’s successful debut. About a Boy features a character very similar to Rob: Will Lightman, another floating single man in his mid-thirties. Hornby introduces Will to us as he takes a quiz in a men’s magazine and earns an astounding score. “How cool was Will Lightman? . . . He was, according to the questionnaire, subzero! He was dry ice! He was Frosty the Snowman! He would die of hypothermia?”

Intelligent, amusing, and clever, Will has done absolutely nothing with his life and isn’t all that bothered about it. He lives on an income provided by royalties from his late father’s one hit song, “Santa’s Super Sleigh,” and spends his days reading, watching TV, driving around London, and smoking pot. When he finds himself compelled to deal with a suicidal woman, the experience angers him: “People like Fiona . . . 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.”

Fiona is the single mother of another boy — but unlike Will, he’s an actual boy, a twelve-year-old named Marcus. Marcus is the true protagonist of About a Boy, Hornby’s finest creation and the truest evidence of his growth as a novelist. Humorless, literal-minded, wounded, and brave, Marcus must cope with a mother plunged into terminal depression and a distant father who seeks his son out only after “having this big think about his life” once he’d broken his collarbone.

His mother has relocated Marcus from Cambridge to London, where he is friendless and alone. “There were no rules here,” Marcus reflects, “and he was old enough to know that when you went to a place, or a time, with no rules, then things were bound to be more complicated.” Because his mother has forbidden him television and insists he listen only to music she likes — Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley — Marcus is unworldly and ignorant of the common culture in a way that isolates him from others his age. He becomes the target of school bullies and teachers even as his mother begins to disintegrate emotionally.

But he is utterly bereft of self-pity; Marcus accepts his heartbreaking fate as one of life’s victims until the Sunday he returns home from a picnic and finds his mother “lying in a pool of sick” after an overdose. It was at this picnic that Marcus and Will met for the first time, and it’s the collision of these two characters that gives About a Boy its remarkable resonance.

Will is a present-day version of the indolent aristocrats who populate the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, and his plotline is as farcical as any Jeeves or Blandings Castle story. After meeting a gorgeous woman in a bar who turns out to be the divorced mother of a small child, he figures he has found a goldmine and decides to pose as a single father at a support group. “His career as a serial nice guy had begun,” Hornby writes.

At the support group (where he has to keep reminding himself that his mythical two-year-old son is named Ned and not Ted), Will meets a friend of Fiona’s, and he gradually becomes enmeshed in Marcus’s life. Will tries desperately to remain a farcical character (later in the book he tries to fob Marcus off as his kid to seduce yet another woman), but Marcus drags him kicking and screaming into the real world. Fiona lives, and the single-minded Marcus begins imposing himself on Will, first because he wants to marry Will off to his mother and then just out of need — for a friend, for a father, for a childish adult whose life has prepared him to teach an adult-like child to be a boy.

Will tries to hide from Marcus, to drive him away, but the boy breaks down his resistance. Will eventually realizes that he might not be “able to tell Marcus how to grow up, or how to cope with a suicidal mother, or anything like that, but he could certainly tell him that Kurt Cobain didn’t play for Manchester United, and for a twelve-year-old boy attending a comprehensive school at the end of 1993, that was maybe the most important information of all.”

At the beginning of the novel, Will believes that “you had to live in your own bubble.” By the end, he feels “like a chick whose egg had been cracked open, and he was outside in the world shivering and unsteady on his feet . . . without so much as a Paul Smith suit or a pair of Ray-Bans to protect him.”

It’s easy to see why Hollywood went wild for About a Boy: It sounds like Kramer vs. Kramer meets Three Men and a Baby. The movie will be hideous, sentimental, and meretricious. The joy of About a Boy is that it is a book — a novel that may remind people why they fell in love with novels in the first place.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, John Podhoretz is editor of the editorial pages of the New York Post.