About a Boy

Thirty-six-year-old Will is a lazy, selfish character living off the royalties of his father’s hit song. Rather than a conventional job, he seems to make a career out of being cool and scheming to manipulate women. The strategy he uses most in the story is inventing a son to meet single mothers. While Will is attractive enough to garner women’s attention, he is too bland, dispassionate, and irresponsible to be taken seriously. Thus, he uses his fake son to seem well rounded and interesting. It is only by learning to care for Marcus that Will truly becomes interesting. He finds that he must summon the empathy and responsibility he has avoided to be an appealing match for Rachel, the women he grows to love.

Although Will asserts that he is self-reliant and shallow, he wants to feel needed and enjoys the thought of “helping people” (88). His initial idea of charity is the quick-fix method, evidenced by his decision to buy Marcus cooler shoes to solve the bullying problem rather than a more substantive solution. As Will’s character develops, he learns true help means being reliable, responsible, and doing difficult things, like talking to depressive Fiona. He learns that being a true contributor in life, and thus someone worthy of Rachel’s affection, means occasionally putting others’ interests before his own. At the end of the novel, Will has grown up, in the sense that he is vulnerable, responsible, and finally accepts that he cannot shut life out. 

Fiona Brewer, Marcus’s mother, is a music therapist described as a “peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion” (111). A liberal ideologue, Fiona imposes her vegetarianism and avoidance of popular, contemporary television and music on Marcus. While Fiona’s values give her a sense of identity, when they are imposed on Marcus, they do nothing to help him adjust to the world.

Ironically, for someone with such high-minded values, depressive Fiona often struggles to see the point of life, to the point of suicide attempts. While she has definitive ideas on how Marcus should behave, she has an ambivalent attitude to motherhood and often feels Marcus is a burden. Despite feeling Will is too shallow to be in Marcus’s life, once Will’s influence helps Marcus become a regular kid, she finds her son less “hard to cope with” (277). Fiona therefore learns that loosening the reins on Marcus gives her a break from the difficult task of parenting. 

Suzie is Fiona’s best friend, mother of Megan and the SPAT member Will targets for his next romantic conquest. Although Suzie ceases to play an important role in the narrative after Fiona’s suicide attempt, Suzie’s primary function is highlighting Will’s selfish thoughtlessness. 

Rachel is the single mother who succeeds in changing Will’s personality. A children’s book illustrator and mother to 12-year-old Ali, Rachel is “nervy, glamorous, Bohemian, clever” with “lots of unruly dark hair” (171). She is so magnetic that Will falls in love with her, and her passion-filled life helps him see how hollow his own is.

Unlike Suzie, who dismisses Will as a fraud after finding out he has been lying about having a son, Rachel forces him to become accountable. She recognizes that Will’s relationship with Marcus is the truest aspect of his false fatherhood. By not turning up to Will’s meeting with Fiona, she insists that Will develop the adult capacity to engage with a woman he is not sexually attracted to. Rachel proves to be a truly precious influence on Will’s life, and he worries constantly about losing her. Through caring about Rachel, Will realizes how much he also cares about Marcus and Fiona; he is not merely interested in them, but has his feelings invested in them.

Ellie McRae is “famous” in Marcus’s school for getting “in trouble for something or other, usually something quite bad” (135). A “sulky, scruffy girl from year ten who hacked off her own hair and wore black lipstick” (135), Ellie is initially intimidating to Marcus, although he admires how cool she is and develops a crush on her. Ellie is different from the other kids at school because she celebrates Marcus’s quirks, valuing his accidental humor and sensitivity. However, Marcus’s idiosyncrasies diminish during his contact with Ellie as he joins her in teenage rebellion.

Ellie’s defining characteristic is her adoration of Nirvana’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain. She believes Cobain is the only person who understands her, based on his songs’ subject matter. When he dies by suicide, she acts out and smashes a record store window displaying his image, which she believes is “the commercial exploitation of Kurt Cobain’s death” (252). However, when she learns that the record store owner is as big a Nirvana fan as herself, she is humbled. This reveals Ellie’s deep desire to connect and be understood in a world that, according to her convictions, rejects her. 

Marcus’s father Clive lives in Cambridge with his girlfriend Lindsey and is a pot-smoking social services worker. Clive is not very present in Marcus’s life for Marcus; thus Marcus neither misses him nor considers him a true father. Clive is cut off from the difficult realities of Marcus’s life, such as the bullying and Fiona’s suicide attempt; when he falls off the windowsill and reflects on his parenting failures, Marcus has the furious sensation that his father is too late in trying to bond with him. 

Angie is a single mother who Will meets at the beginning of the novel. She is described as having movie-star good looks, which attracts Will, even though he does not like children. Angie appears grateful for Will’s attentions to both herself and her two children; however, she has a lingering devotion to her ex-partner, Simon. This ultimately leads her dumping Will, catalyzing his decision to only date single mothers.