About a Boy

Hornby’s novel takes place in 1993, Islington, a part of North London known for its mix of people, posh cafes, arcades, and vinyl shops. Hornby frequently cites streets, local places, and contemporary musicians and fashion designers, creating an idiosyncratic atmosphere and stamping the time and place firmly in the reader’s mind. The people who populate the book are creations of their time and place, not timeless ciphers of the human condition. A common aspect of 1990s culture was a rejection of the mainstream and an affected ennui. The characters that best embody this are Will and Ellie, who experience boredom with their everyday lives and look for high-emotion outlets.

From the outset, Will is aware that he is a product of his time. He speculates that his lifestyle—living off the royalties of a dead parent’s song and never working or forming relationships—could not have existed 60 years ago, when there were no appealing media distractions. Will considers that “you didn’t have to have a life of your own any more; you could just peek over the fence at other people’s lives, as lived in newspapers and EastEnders and exquisitely sad jazz or tough rap songs” (6). According to him, these media distractions are sufficiently gripping, so one’s entire existence could be lived vicariously.

However, the truth is there is still ample idle time left over, so Will watches second-rate daytime television, like the quiz show “Countdown.” The show, which features contestants completing challenges against the clock, is an ironic choice for Will; while the contestants feel starved of time, Will watches the show to “stay afloat” in the “enormous ocean of time […] at his disposal” (71), and essentially waste some of it. Indeed, Will’s life before meeting Marcus becomes so vacuous that, contrary to the vast majority of the population, Will “loved the traffic, which allowed him to believe that he was a man in a hurry and offered him rare opportunities for frustration and anger (other people had to do things to let off steam, but Will had to do things to build it up)” (142). Arguably, “being a man in a hurry” is one of Will’s vicarious fantasies; he pretends to be a hero from one of the many TV shows he watches. The unpleasant emotions of “frustration and anger” are novelties to Will, as is the “pain” he encounters on listening to Nirvana (142).

While Will’s boredom results from having neither work nor responsibilities, the desire to indulge in something more dramatic than everyday life is a phenomenon shared by other characters in the novel—namely, Ellie. Marcus notices the parallel between Will, whose walls are covered with pictures of jazz singers who died of a drug overdoses, and Ellie, who idolizes Nirvana’s suicidal lead singer, Kurt Cobain. Marcus, haunted by the sight of his collapsed mother after her overdose on prescription drugs, feels he has experienced enough of the reality of suicide or drug-taking to know that neither is glamorous.

Marcus thinks Ellie intentionally makes her life harder by shouting at people and wearing a Kurt Cobain sweatshirt that gets her into trouble at school. He insists she is not in the same funk as his depressive mother, who feels an indefinable sort of grief that makes her feel “flat” (65), and is therefore upset that Ellie pretends to have real problems. However, Ellie craves a misunderstood, tormented life, like what she imagines Kurt Cobain’s to be. While mourning Kurt Cobain, she feels that she has to outdo “all these heartbroken young people” on the news who are tearfully hugging each other (259); she expresses her grief via a more violent approach and smashes a record store window.

Like Will, Ellie latches onto media entertainment—in this case, the music of Nirvana—to create the augmented emotional experience that real life denies her. While Ellie and Will are products of their time, their characteristics remain relevant to modern readers because they resemble the internet-addicted generation that craves extremes and experiences their lives and emotions vicariously.