Author Nick Hornby is beginning to grow up

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

or those unacquainted with British author Nick Hornby's hugely popular Fever Pitch and High Fidelity--or unfamiliar with your basic unmarried straight male in the 25 to 40-ish range--here is a description of the typical Hornby protagonist: he is detached from his feelings and determined to remain so; he is appealing in an inconspicuous kind of way; he is wryly self-deprecating and means well, at least most of the time. If Hornby were writing articles for women's magazines, the word "commitment" would crop up a lot.

With his new novel, About a Boy (Victor Gollancz, 286 pages), Hornby has created a character who is, if this is possible, even less anchored to the world of human relationships than High Fidelity's Rob Fleming--a guy who, at the first sign of trouble, rearranges his record collection instead of his life. At the age of 36, Will Freeman (get it?) lives in a cool flat in North London and listens to cool music and waits for girlfriends to dump him before he dumps them. He has perfected the art of not working and lives off the royalties of Santa's Super Sleigh, a song written by his dead father. When he visits friends who are married with children, he is comically appalled: "Clutter!" Will thinks. "How could people live like this?"

In case the reader does not quite understand the unbearable lightness of Will's life, Hornby reminds us, a bit more often than necessary. Will tends to think things like, "What good were real feelings anyway?" or "It was easy life. Easy peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth it if the odds were in your favor, and they quite clearly weren't."

In search of good sex, then, Will decides that single mothers make the best girlfriends (they're both very busy and very grateful), and so he invents an imaginary son and begins attending SPAT (Single Parents--Alone Together) meetings to find chicks. Instead, he meets Marcus, a geeky 12-year-old whose parents have split and who is having a rough time at school. Half of this novel is told from Marcus's desperately wise, unironic point of view; he is the real thing, the uncorrupted version of what Will has become. "Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult," Will realizes after the boy starts showing up on his doorstep after school. "And, unhappily for Will, that was exactly the kind of assistance he was qualified to provide. He wasn't able to tell Marcus how to grow up, or how to cope with a suicidal mother...but he could certainly tell him that Kurt Cobain didn't play for Manchester United."

So just who is the "boy" of the title? The trajectory of this novel holds few surprises, and About a Boy, perhaps because we have met this character before, does not offer the same sort of bull's-eye on the zeitgeist thrill that Hornby's first two books did. But the author's sense of comedy--and the poignant Marcus--save the book from descending into pat sentimentality. Hornby has come a long way from the loser narrator of his autobiographical Fever Pitch, a football-obsessed man who seems like he will never make anything of himself: the film rights to About a Boy were snapped up for $2.75 million months before the novel came out. He may have a great deal to say about the sort of guy who lives off a jingle his father wrote, but Hornby's own tune is quite catchy enough.