Sometimes Hornby and the Believer butt heads. He writes in one column that he and the magazine’s editors reach an agreement “that if it looks like I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name.” Listed at the top of that column are “Unnamed Literary Novel” and “Unnamed Work of Nonfiction.” In the magazine’s debut issue, Julavits wrote an essay arguing that most book criticism is too snarky and negative, and Hornby has more or less been instructed to avoid negative reviews.

Julavits wasn’t completely wrong; it’s a snarkiness you see in film and TV and music criticism as well. Usually, but not exclusively (see Lane, Anthony), this snarkiness is expounded by younger critics who have not yet discovered that you start to do good criticism only when you realize how little you know. But I’m not sure Julavits knows that difference between deserved sharpness and showoffy meanness.

A book critic I know, someone not at all given to meanness, once confessed to me that she felt guilty when panning a book because the writer had gone to “all that work.” I told her that she had gone to a lot of work as well, “the work of turning the pages.” Reading a book you don’t like is miserable toil; the sensible thing to do is abandon it and find something you enjoy. But a critic has to read all the way to the end — unless you believe reviews should only be positive.

It’s true that critics often do their best work when they get to write on what they love. And there’s no point in knocking a small book that isn’t getting any attention from the press or any publicity from its publisher. But a critic should be free to say honestly that something is bad, how bad it is and why it’s bad. Even when that is gently done, it doesn’t make friends, and it doesn’t honor hard work or good intentions that, if the result isn’t up to snuff, count for bupkis.

The Believer has made space for good critics. Where it deserves credit for bucking a trend that is harming contemporary criticism isn’t in its attitude toward negative reviews but in the freedom it has given Hornby for his column.

At a time when editors are obsessed with what’s hot, and with what New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent called “the overwhelmingly meaningless desire to be first” (as if all other reviews of a work are redundant after the first one appears), the Believer has allowed Hornby to write about whatever he’s reading, whether it’s the hot new novel, a classic he wants to reread or some obscure title he has always meant to get around to.

This is important for two reasons. Unlike critics in any other art, it’s possible for book reviewers to write piece after piece without talking about what people are actually reading. A book critic free to write about classics, old favorites, new books or whatever stands a better chance of connecting with more readers than someone who’s just striving to keep up with what comes down the literary poop-chute.

Second, Hornby is writing about the day-to-day process of being readers as most of us practice it — not following some neat scheme but reading without premeditation, going higgledy-piggledy from one subject to another, based on whim, recommendation, chance.

The result is less a column to read for insight into any one book (though there is that sometimes) than a column in which to recognize the habits that bind readers together, no matter the differences in what they read.

That recognition starts with the two lists that headline every Hornby column: “Books Bought” and “Books Read.” Sometimes entries in the former end up on the latter that month, a few months later or not at all. Anyone who buys more books than he or she can read (i.e., any reader), and who then lets those acquisitions hang around for months or years, will look at those lists and sense a kindred spirit. (The surest way to spot a nonreader: someone who comes into your house, looks at your books and asks, “Have you read all these?”)

Hornby is terrific on the haphazard way we’re led to books. An example: He’s a big fan of the Philadelphia band Marah. (They figured in his wonderful New York Times Op-Ed column last May about what it feels like for a pop fan to fall out of sync with contemporary music.) Marah’s latest album, “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky,” takes its name from a trilogy of novels written in the 1930s by English writer Patrick Hamilton. Thus is Hornby led to Hamilton.

For me, it doesn’t end there. I had come across Hamilton’s name last year, in reading B.R. Myers’ “A Reader’s Manifesto” (one of the only pieces of cultural criticism of the past few years that really matters), and ordered both “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky” and Hamilton’s later “Hangover Square” from Amazon U.K. When they came, I looked them over, kept them on my night table for a few days, then shelved them and forgot about them. When I came upon Hamilton’s name in this book, I got out “Hangover Square” and found, just as my Penguin edition blurbed, “one of the great novels of the 20th century.” (Suffice it to say that Hamilton writes about street life with an honesty and lyricism, an absence of sentimentality or fetish for squalor, that should make nearly every hard-boiled writer hang his or her head in shame.)

That is the circuitous process by which we come to books. And with the supermarket nature of the modern book megastores impeding the interaction of customers, and seeming to offer so much that nearly any choice you make is going to feel wrong, we need to value all the quirks of fate and coincidence that lead us to particular books.

Many of Hornby’s best insights are tossed off, such as this from his discussion of Pete Dexter’s “Train”: “It seemed to me as though poor Norah lost her nipple through a worldview rather than through a narrative inevitability.” Hornby admires Dexter’s novel. But his offhand remark on the grisly fate of Dexter’s character is an obituary (and not a loving one) for every novelist who has ever tried to impress us with his or her toughness (what I call the “Jump up and down so we can hear ‘em clank together” school of writing).

Hornby isn’t always on target. Some of his insights are the sort of silly things we say and later have the good sense to retract, as when Hornby realizes he was foolish to claim that a good literary experience trumps most other good cultural experiences. He does not, sadly, back down from this really dumb statement: “Usually, books have gone out of print for a reason, and that reason is they’re no good, or, at least, of very marginal interest. (Yeah, yeah, your favorite book of all time is out of print and it’s a scandal. But I’ll bet you any money you like it’s not as good as ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ or ‘The Power and the Glory,’ or anything else still available that was written in the same year.)”

I’m not the person to whom you should make an argument using J.D. Salinger as a measure of greatness (“‘sincere” in the manner of an advertising man’s necktie,” said Mary McCarthy of “Franny and Zooey” in 1962). But does Hornby really believe that nothing great goes out of print? The New York Review of Books has established an entire imprint dedicated to books that have gone out of print, and in just the last year they’ve given us, among others, Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond” and John Horne Burns’ “The Gallery,” great books both. Perhaps, in 20 or 30 years, when Hornby’s best novel so far, “How to Be Good,” is out of print, it would be worth asking him if he still believes this? (He may be modest enough not to think that prospect is any big deal.)

What’s most valuable about this collection, though, is that Hornby, by dint of his sensibility and the variety of his choices, shows that the distinction still made between reading for the sake of “enrichment” (as that gasbag Harold Bloom insists upon) and reading for pleasure is a phony divide. After encountering Dennis Lehane’s novels, Hornby wonders why no one has ever recommended the writer to him, and answers, “Because I don’t know the right kind of people, that’s why. In the last three weeks, about five different people have told me that Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Line of Beauty’ is a work of genius” — he’s right, he doesn’t know the right kind of people — “and I’m sure it is … I’m equally sure, however, that I won’t walk into a lamppost while reading it, like I did with ‘Presumed Innocent’ all those years ago … I’m happy to have friends who recommend Alan Hollinghurst, really I am. They’re all nice, bright people. I just wish I had friends who could recommend books like ‘Mystic River,’ too. Are you that person? Do you have any vacancies for a pal?” (It’s your lucky day, Hornby. Get Denise Mina’s “Garnethill” trilogy, Val McDermid’s “Killing the Shadows” and “A Place of Execution,” Ace Atkins’ “Dark End of the Street,” Kris Nelscott’s Smokey Dalton series and Ruth Rendell’s “A Judgement in Stone.” Then let’s talk.)

What I like about that passage is that it’s not an either/or opposition. There’s no assuming that someone who walks into a lamppost because of a thriller is not going to have time for a literary novel. And, in my experience, there are very few readers who are either/or sorts of readers. (To be fair to Hollinghurst, I didn’t poop out on “The Line of Beauty” halfway through because it’s too literary. I quit because there’s no payoff to the structure he sets up in the first half of the book. There’s just more of Hollinghurst’s minor, calibrated observations, and a jump ahead in time that saves him from writing the novel’s transition, one that makes no emotional sense anyway. The English novels to read on the Thatcher era remain Jonathan Coe’s “The Winshaw Legacy” and Ian McEwan’s “The Child in Time.”)

In a stroke typical of Hornby’s approach, his best insight into the insularity of the literary mindset comes in an aside prompted by a quote from Janet Malcolm’s “Reading Chekhov,” a book Hornby likes. Malcolm wrote: “Everyone has seen a ‘Cherry Orchard’ or an ‘Uncle Vanya,’ while very few have ever heard of ‘The Wife,’ or ‘In the Ravine.’” To which Hornby responds, “Perhaps this isn’t the right time to talk about what ‘everyone’ means here, although one is entitled to stop and wonder at the world in which our men and women of letters live — not ‘everyone’ has seen a football match or an episode of ‘Seinfeld,’ let alone a nineteenth-century Russian play.”

Malcolm was, of course, pointing out that Chekhov’s plays are better known than his short fiction, and chose a clumsy way of saying that. But the assumption behind that clumsiness deserves comment. Why is it that those who have the most vested in encouraging people to read are often the ones least suited for the job? Saying that “everyone” knows Chekhov is, whether intentionally or not, one of those statements guaranteed to make people feel out of it, to make them feel that culture is a closed circuit to which they can find no point of entry. I’m not advocating the opposite, that idiotic state of affairs where you assume that no one knows anything and even common cultural references have to be identified, for fear of insulting the reader.

What Hornby does so beautifully here is to assume the intelligence of his readers, and to obliterate the literature/pleasure divide by acting, sensibly, as if it didn’t exist. The implicit message of these columns is that nothing that is not pleasurable has a right to be considered art. It certainly doesn’t have a right to your time.

Love is all around in “About a Boy,” but it’s tucked into the nooks and crannies between wicked wisecracks, cruel-to-be-kind words and lots of eye-rolling. The movie doesn’t so much envelop us in love as kick us in the butt with it, sending us on our way feeling awake and alive and a little bruised. Sometimes love hurts; other times it just smarts.

When you have to describe the plot of “About a Boy” in 25 words or less, you say it’s about an immature lout who learns how to be a grown-up by befriending an odd little boy — which is essentially true, although it makes the story (as told in both the movie and the Nick Hornby novel it’s based on) sound much gloppier than it is, like “A Christmas Carol” crossed with “Peter Pan.”

More specifically, “About a Boy” is about the way human beings trade information and observations and feelings with one another, and about how others can sometimes make you see your way toward being the person you didn’t even know you wanted to be. It’s also about the ways parents unwittingly cripple their own children with their love, even by doing something as seemingly small as making them wear a goofy sweater to school.

When parents tell their children (as they rightly should), “Individuality is wonderful! Embrace it!” it’s sometimes their own individuality they’re championing, after having firmly imprinted it on their kids. Without being churlish or mean, “About a Boy” shows us how hard it is for parents to grow up, too, suggesting that letting your child become his or her own person might be the final and most important (not to mention the most difficult) act of shedding your own childhood.

Hornby’s novel is sweet, if slight, and eminently enjoyable as a pop-culture snapshot. It’s also an honest rumination on the way material goods, as expressions of our own personal style, sometimes have a value far beyond their actual cost. But while Hornby’s characters were sharply drawn, his story was diffuse and meandering. The movie, directed by the team that gave us “American Pie,” Paul and Chris Weitz, captures the essence of Hornby’s story and sharpens the edges: It’s faster and funnier and sleeker than the book, and its distinctive stylization really makes Hornby’s ideas gel.

The Weitzes’ “About a Boy” moves along swiftly, swerving and curving around every obvious pothole; the directors take care of every detail without spelling out the obvious for us. For once, we’re simply left to use our intelligence and wits as the story unfolds before us. That should be the rule, and not the exception, in mainstream movies, yet it has become increasingly rare. “About a Boy” is as close to mainstream perfection as I’ve seen all year. It gives us everything we want, need and deserve without batting an eye.

Hugh Grant plays Will, a spoiled arrested adolescent who doesn’t have to work because his dad wrote a hit Christmas song years ago; the royalties keep rolling in as sure as December keeps rolling around. (When a prospective girlfriend asks him, with wide-eyed curiosity, if even door-to-door carolers need to pay for the privilege of singing “Santa’s Super Sleigh,” Will responds tartly, and at least half-seriously, “They should, actually, but you can’t always catch up with the bastards.”)

Will has a slick London apartment loaded with lots of cool toys, and nothing to do but fill his days with TV watching, pool playing and hunting around for women whom he’ll date for a while and then unceremoniously dump. After a friend hooks him up with a recently divorced single mom, he realizes he’s hit the jackpot: Single mothers are exceedingly grateful for every bit of attention shown them, which makes them much less demanding than your ordinary, garden-variety girlfriend.

To meet more of these spectacular creatures, Will invents a child for himself and attends a meeting of a local single-parents group called SPAT, for Single Parents Alone Together. That’s how he eventually comes to meet 11-year-old Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), the shuffling, Peruvian-knit-sweater-wearing child of a perennially depressed arrested hippie and music therapist, Fiona (Toni Collette).

To call Marcus an awkward kid is an understatement: At school, even the little Pakistani computer nerds, the lowest fishies in the schoolyard pond, inform him solemnly that he can’t hang out with them anymore. We know the kid’s really in trouble when we see his mother, her ethnic earrings dangling cheerfully in cruel contrast with her dour, tear-stained face, sprinkling the morning breakfast cereal into bowls: It’s called Ancient Grains.

It takes forever for Will to warm up to Marcus, which is one of the great joys of “About a Boy”: Any transformation that’s going to stick can’t be easy, so we relish the long, stretched-out moments in which Will finds dozens of ways to tell Marcus to buzz off. Their friendship isn’t a sudden click; it’s more of a gradual erosion, the sort of thing that eventually turns beach glass back into sand, with Marcus doing the grinding. The evolution of their friendship is charted cleverly in a montage that shows Marcus, day after day after day, ringing Will’s doorbell after school and plopping himself down on the couch, despite Will’s obvious protestations, as if it were the world’s most eminently reasonable act.

Marcus isn’t immediately lovable: He’s as weird and annoying to us as he is to Will, with his assertively all-wrong clothes and his tendency to blurt out the lyrics of soppy ’70s songs at inappropriate times. But as Marcus is written (the screen adaptation of Hornby’s book is by Peter Hedges) and, even more important, as Hoult plays him, you can’t help warming to him.

Marcus’ walk, a kind of flat-footed shuffle in which his legs move independently from his rigid torso, at first represents everything about him that’s closed off and fearful: By the movie’s end, you see it as something different, a natural trait that somehow matches how open and funny and free this kid is. Hoult, with his devilishly unkempt eyebrows and cherubically too-red lips, plays one of those pre-teens who still looks too much like his mother’s little boy, and your heart goes out to him — Hoult doesn’t try to grab it from you, as so many child actors do.

Collette, as Fiona, has an even tougher job: Here in the early 2000s, we all recognize that it’s perfectly acceptable to laugh at hippies who just can’t let go of their security ponchos. Collette actually invites us to; indeed, how can we avoid it, when Fiona shows up for a lunch date with Will in a hairy monstrosity of a sweater that Will later characterizes as a “Yeti costume”?

But Collette also pulls off the more difficult feat of making us feel something for her every step of the way. Fiona is suicidal, but even though we’re aware of her pain, we also see how much it hurts Marcus. (“I feel better now,” she says simply, beaming calmly at him after she returns from a stay at a mental hospital, as if his loneliness and confusion were mere accessories to her own smoothed-over feelings.) Collette forces us to acknowledge both Fiona’s suffering and her selfishness, a tricky line to walk.

She bounces brilliantly off Grant’s Will, whose annoyance with her boils into frustration and then full-blown rage, when he confronts her with the ways in which she’s “made” Marcus so weird. “You daft fucking hippie!” he hurls at her, and the line is as funny as it is cruel and weirdly poignant. Grant, who used to hide far too coyly behind his public-schoolboy stammer and floppy forelock, has turned into a marvelously unself-conscious actor. He’s best when he’s playing a bit of a bastard: The evil glimmer in his eyes when he spied Renée Zellweger’s giant granny underpants in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” was one of the sexiest things I’ve seen at the movies in years.

Grant’s also an incredibly game actor: He gives it the full throttle, in his inimitably understated way, when he explains to two of his sunshiney, new-parent friends that he can’t possibly be their infant’s godfather because he’ll only be trying to put the make on her when she turns 18. It’s a hilarious moment, but even more remarkable is the way Grant’s resolute orneriness meshes with the person he becomes later in the movie.

When Will notices that Marcus is wearing the dorkiest shoes on planet Earth, he buys him cool new trainers — Will is grimly determined that the shoes will be what helps this kid through the roughest years of his life, and in a roundabout way, he’s right. Grant is wonderful here because he recognizes that a character can soften without turning into a marshmallow. He’s also, I have to note, aging beautifully: He has never looked as handsome as he does here. Those few inklings of crow’s feet are the best thing that could have happened to his impishly good-looking face.

Every performance in “About a Boy” moves naturally and beautifully in concert with the others. It’s a movie that works on every level, starting at its very core. It’s the movie the Weitzes were destined to make. They aren’t known as subtle directors, although they should be: “American Pie,” at first written off as a shallow teen gross-out comedy, has actually found an audience that sees its larger value; for one thing, no teen movie since “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” has shown so much sensitivity toward teenage girls in the face of boys’ sexual cloddishness. The Weitzes’ second feature, “Down to Earth,” didn’t resonate as clearly but was nonetheless wrongly overlooked: It’s a sweet-natured and well-made entertainment.

But neither picture comes together as wholly as “About a Boy.” Its apparent lightness is actually many-layered: The Weitzes are masters at playing two (or, more often, many) emotions off one another at once. When we see Fiona and Marcus gathered round their tinkly home piano, belting out a rousing and stupendously earnest rendition of “Killing Me Softly,” we wince, just as Will does. Then, just as it does with Will, our vague amusement at the ridiculousness of it all transmutes into something like horror. And yet, even as we’re howling with laughter at them, it’s impossible to feel derision — their belief in the power of this lousy song transcends its innate crappiness, and we see them, and the bond between them, as something inherently wonderful despite its corny trappings.

That’s a pretty subtle thing for two directors, best known for a movie in which a teenager humps a piece of pastry, to pull off. But then, “About a Boy” is all about the process of becoming something that no one, least of all yourself, ever thought you could be. The Weitzes have topped themselves, and their movie is an invitation to us to tap the better parts of our nature, without resorting to cheap self-congratulation. The not-so-secret message of “About a Boy” is that people are bastards. And bastards are so much easier to love than saints.