The Boys by Leo Robson review – a likeable debut with aimless charm

The critic turned author’s witty, eccentric novel follows a Londoner reading Susan Sontag and looking for love

Early on in Leo Robson’s debut novel, the narrator, a likable, aimless, rather detached young Londoner named Johnny Voghel, reads “a book of Susan Sontag essays and interviews”. Johnny’s copy of what he later identifies as A Susan Sontag Reader is an heirloom. It has been extensively underlined by his mother, who has just died, and by his estranged half-brother Lawrence. Johnny wonders if reading Sontag, or his family’s other heavily annotated books, will “unlock a secret or hint at one, offer a glimpse of their dreams or invite them into mine”.

A Susan Sontag Reader includes Sontag’s 1968 defence of Jean-Luc Godard, the great modernist and Marxist provocateur of French New Wave cinema. If Johnny, in search of family connection, happened to read that essay, he would encounter a paragraph that rather neatly describes the novel that he is in the process of narrating. Godard’s films, Sontag writes, “show an interrelated group of fictional characters located in a recognisable, consistent environment: in his case, usually contemporary and urban”. But “while the sequence of events in a Godard film suggests a fully articulated story, it doesn’t add up to one […] actions are often opaque, and fail to issue into consequences”.