About a Boy, by Nick Hornby: A Delightful Read

Marcus is a bullied kid with a somber mother. (Nick Hornby's mastery ensures that Marcus's Mom be crisply characterized with only a few deft strokes.) The way Hornby presents Marcus's rationalizations about coping with life is detached and tentative to mimic Marcus's own contained emotional involvement with issues that affect him. This is in some contrast with the way Hornby presents Will's thoughts, which tend to be more urgent and cut-and-dry.

Somehow I kept seeing Hugh Grant as Will, even though at the time of my reading the book I hadn't seen the movie. A different kind of Hugh Grant. One that is not ditzy, but one that is irresponsible in an endearing and somewhat grounded way. Meaning he can pull off lying about having a kid but still fit the mold of someone who has some routines down pat and a way of navigating life which otherwise shies away from the seriously erratic -- but which also protects him from serious relationships and the hard questions and hard work that come with them.

I liked the way the characters sprung to life from restrained comments which never revealed too much in one passage as if for fear some spell might be broken. There was true mastery in having us follow the characters without ever getting ahead of them. One reviewer in The Herald called the book "sadly predictable." I couldn't disagree more. Each reaction was, of course, in tune with a character's make-up but also a nicely calibrated surprise.

The dialogues and narrator's comments were fantastic. They crayoned each character's idiosyncrasies so vividly, almost hyperrealistically, while at the same time with such carefully gauged humor, that they elicited a variety of smiles and laughs -- laughs I tended to keep quiet, as if in collusion with an author who is trying to keep an avuncular straight face.

All in all, a deceptively simple novel (I tend to find and like many "deceptively simple" books) about a preteen and an older boy who grow more mature together. It makes for a delightful read.