'About A Boy' by Nick Hornby

January 2025 - 'About A Boy' by Nick Hornby

Our first read of 2025 was Nick Hornby’s comic novel, a best seller published in 1998 that sold over a million copies. Hornby was the leading light in the “lad-lit” genre that was a huge influence on British publishing in the 1990s, and the novel was made into a film and television series.

Will and Marcus

Our narrators are Will, an overindulged 36 year old layabout who lives on the proceeds of his father’s hit Christmas record, and Marcus, a 12 year old boy who lives with his seriously depressed mother and who is trying to making sense of the world around him. The question to start us off was “about which boy?” – Will or Marcus?

The characters take turns in narrating each chapter, a direct and effective way of understanding them. Marcus in particular is delightful to read, often more grown up than Will and more sophisticated in his understanding of the world, he is responsible for much of the novel’s humour. One reader felt that the most effective feature of the novel is the quiet development of each character.

London of the 1990s

Immediate reactions to the novel were mixed. Some of the group felt that it had dated and not necessarily for the better, though others enjoyed a return to London of the 1990s and found the experience quite nostalgic. Others felt that the novel relied on stereotypes and negative portrayals of single parents, though the novel’s ending, which suggests the potential of self-made communities offered an optimistic view of our capacity to make connections outside of the family.

Several conversations covered the subject of mental illness as described in the novel, experienced by several characters but most painfully by Fiona, Marcus’s mother. The analysis of her depression is rather old-fashioned and we felt was handled in quite a blunt way. This led to a discussion about whether this was a fair representation of attitudes to mental health in the 1990s, and perhaps a sign of how much more nuanced popular knowledge of mental illness is today. The novel’s sympathies are with Marcus, who has to parent his own parent, yet we felt Fiona deserved a more empathic reading.

Set in Islington

We also discussed the novel’s setting, in Islington, specifically around Angel and Upper Street. This is a novel with a very specific geography (even though the film was all shot in the streets surrounding The London Archives in Clerkenwell!). Hornby claimed that he chose this are as he knew it well, but we also noted that in the 1990s this was a much less gentrified area where our cast of characters could well bump into each other. We thought it effectively captured London at a very particular moment in time.

You can search for images of Angel and Upper Street in the twentieth century on the London Picture Archive.

Archive sources

The voices of children and teenagers are not routinely found in archive sources, so for the archive display we explored sources where you could find out about the lives of young people, in court records, in record of churches and religious organisations and in the records of charities.

We also looked at some documents from the Mary Ward Settlement which was a centre for pioneering social work. Much of their later work in the twentieth century related to children and young people, with the provision of youth clubs, play groups and holiday schools. They had considerable expertise in working with teenagers. The Centre's Chairman, David Franklin, writes about the youth work in the 1970s in LMA/4524/F/01/009.