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A review by writerdgabrielle
About a Boy by Nick Hornby
2.0
I have enjoyed the screen adaptations of Nick Hornby's books—High Fidelity, About a Boy—and I have had this one on my TBR shelf for (maybe, embarrassingly) years and finally dug it out because I needed a palate cleanser.
Caveat: when I say "adaptation," in this case, I mean the television version with David Walton and Minnie Driver; I have not seen the Hugh Grant version and now having read the book, I cannot imagine that casting working nearly as well as David Walton playing Will Freeman . . . that said, back to the book.
We start the book with a selfish, aloof man in his thirties (Will), who has never done anything because he's the equivalent of a trust fund kid and didn't aspire to be anything else, and a clearly autistic-coded boy (this will hence forth be known as problem #1, although it wouldn't have been in 1998) who is struggling to adjust to new surroundings (Marcus) and the two have no reason to ever come into contact with one another until Will concocts the convoluted idea that pretending to be the father of a toddler would be a good in for dating single mothers, a dating pool left desperately untapped.
Through a series of events, Will and Marcus meet and while this is an opportunity to really live up to the reviews, making this a hilarious and heartwarming story of two people helping one another find their true selves, no scene really does anything more than scratch the surface, as if the third-person past tense narration is that of a documentarian or a disinterested third party, perhaps the oft-mentioned-but-never-seen Jessica. Though I can see HOW the interactions between Will and Marcus could be eye-opening on both sides, I am left with a level of disbelief.
Maybe it's a question of showing vs. telling, as is so often the advice given to new authors and writing students. In this case, I felt the narrator did a lot of telling us what had happened and how the characters had felt about it. We are told Marcus is angry, rather than shown his accelerated heart rate or sweaty palms or whatever other visual cues might suit a might-be-autistic twelve-year-old boy in 1994.
At the end—and this is where the autistic problem lies—Marcus has either been deprogrammed from twelve years under his mother's quirky influence or has learned wildly successful masking techniques, all in a matter of months. If he were five, this might be believable, but at twelve, I'm skeptical.
All in all, I finished the book. It took a month, which is a lot for a book with 300 pages, but I was curious where it was all going. And my takeaways were as follows:
The television adaptation was better and still resurfaces when I hear One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful. I can't imagine Hugh Grant in the role of Will Freeman (or, if I'm being realistic, Nicholas Hoult as Marcus) but maybe I need to dig up the movie to find out.
I'm a little concerned the other Hornby books I have are going to be written in the same superficial way and I don't think I have the patience to power through them the way I did this one.
Caveat: when I say "adaptation," in this case, I mean the television version with David Walton and Minnie Driver; I have not seen the Hugh Grant version and now having read the book, I cannot imagine that casting working nearly as well as David Walton playing Will Freeman . . . that said, back to the book.
We start the book with a selfish, aloof man in his thirties (Will), who has never done anything because he's the equivalent of a trust fund kid and didn't aspire to be anything else, and a clearly autistic-coded boy (this will hence forth be known as problem #1, although it wouldn't have been in 1998) who is struggling to adjust to new surroundings (Marcus) and the two have no reason to ever come into contact with one another until Will concocts the convoluted idea that pretending to be the father of a toddler would be a good in for dating single mothers, a dating pool left desperately untapped.
Through a series of events, Will and Marcus meet and while this is an opportunity to really live up to the reviews, making this a hilarious and heartwarming story of two people helping one another find their true selves, no scene really does anything more than scratch the surface, as if the third-person past tense narration is that of a documentarian or a disinterested third party, perhaps the oft-mentioned-but-never-seen Jessica. Though I can see HOW the interactions between Will and Marcus could be eye-opening on both sides, I am left with a level of disbelief.
Maybe it's a question of showing vs. telling, as is so often the advice given to new authors and writing students. In this case, I felt the narrator did a lot of telling us what had happened and how the characters had felt about it. We are told Marcus is angry, rather than shown his accelerated heart rate or sweaty palms or whatever other visual cues might suit a might-be-autistic twelve-year-old boy in 1994.
At the end—and this is where the autistic problem lies—Marcus has either been deprogrammed from twelve years under his mother's quirky influence or has learned wildly successful masking techniques, all in a matter of months. If he were five, this might be believable, but at twelve, I'm skeptical.
All in all, I finished the book. It took a month, which is a lot for a book with 300 pages, but I was curious where it was all going. And my takeaways were as follows:
The television adaptation was better and still resurfaces when I hear One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful. I can't imagine Hugh Grant in the role of Will Freeman (or, if I'm being realistic, Nicholas Hoult as Marcus) but maybe I need to dig up the movie to find out.
I'm a little concerned the other Hornby books I have are going to be written in the same superficial way and I don't think I have the patience to power through them the way I did this one.