About a Boy

About a boy

A novel written by Nick Hornby. It's a tragicomically book. It's a funny story written in an entertaining way but in the same time it describes some peoples quite tragically destinies. There is the hippie inspired mother, Fiona, who is depressed and "trying to take her life", her 12 years old son Marcus, trying to live a normal life but always feels like an outsider because of his weird mother, Will a 36 years old teenager, a rootless man spending his life doing nothing respectable. Marcus parents are divorced, Marcus and his mother lives in London. The action of the novel is set in 1992.

Marcus is bullied in school. He had unfashionable clothes, he had wrong haircut and he never owned a pair of trainers. His way of living was just totally wrong. Marcus tried hardly to live such a normal life as possible, but his mother was still in the seventies and thought that the life of today was just all rubbish. They are vegetarians, listen to Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley and instead playing Gameboys they read books. Fiona really passed all her values and opinions over to Marcus, who thought that this was the normal way to live. But later on he realized it wasn't. Marcus knew that something wasn't right though his mum cried all the time. He was having a shit time in school and a shit time at home, witch was all there was to it, witch meant that he was having a shit time all the time. He was only a kid, and she was his mum, and if he felt bad it was her job to stop him feeling that way. But most of the time it was the other way round. Marcus wasn't aloud to be a kid, his mum involved him into her problems, so he's very prematurely ripe.

Just by accident Marcus met Will. Marcus, who acts like a grown up, and Will, who acts like a teenager become friends, and Will teaches Marcus how to bee a teenager, and Marcus shows Will how to grow up and they both starts to act more their ages. At first Fiona disliked it tough she thought Will had bad influent on him. But later on she accepted the friendship. From this moment on the story is about how their friendship develops, an uncommon but sympathetic relation between two different individuals. Will show Marcus another way of living, in fact the life he lives himself, which is more suitable for a teenager.

I think this is the main message in the book, how two persons in different age develop such a strong and nice