About a Boy: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Will meets Angie at a café when he mistakes her for an attractive woman he’d encountered in a record store a few days earlier. Despite the awkward and slightly creepy mix-up—which involves a reference to the children’s TV show Pinky and Perky—Angie and Will start talking and eventually hit it off. On their first date, Angie is quick to inform Will that she has two children. Outwardly, Will responds as one hopes a potential romantic partner would: coolly and open-mindedly. Internally, meanwhile, he entertains running away from the restaurant and abandoning the date altogether.

Trying to win Angie over, Will continues feigning interest in children and, in spite of himself, steadily begins to believe that he might actually have a previously undiscovered affinity for kids. Dumbfounded by Angie’s beauty and convinced she would never be interested in him if she weren’t a single mum with hardly any time to date, Will concludes that the children of beautiful single mothers represent “a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark” which ultimately makes them more accessible to more “average,” unremarkable men. Thus, Will formulates a plan to exclusively date single mothers, believing that their standards are, by necessity, inherently lower.

The more time Will spends with Angie and her kids, the more he marvels at the brilliance of his own strategy. He enjoys dating a beautiful woman who sincerely believes he’s one of the few “good” guys left just because he’s competent with her children—all without the pesky responsibility of parental duties. Will finds that even the sex with single mothers surpasses typical encounters, particularly if they’ve had poor, disappointing experiences with men in the past. Although he knows that his exploitative approach is bound to offend most people, Will is unfazed because, in his view, this gives him a competitive edge.

About six weeks into their relationship, Will decides the time has come to break up with Angie, citing “the whole kid thing,” which sometimes “got in the way.” Surprisingly, however, Angie beats him to the punch. She explains that her ex-husband is uncomfortable with her dating someone new, which complicates things for her. She reassures Will that he has done nothing wrong, but Will could not be more relieved; his plan has worked so smoothly that he avoids the awkward discomfort of a one-sided breakup when he’s ready to move on. He almost feels guilty for how effectively he convinced Angie of his honesty, selflessness, and kindness, yet his success only motivates him to employ the same strategy on other unsuspecting single mothers.