Nick Hornby Faces the Music Again
Nick Hornby will be reading from his latest novel, Juliet, Naked, at the Seattle Public Central Library October 9 at 7:30 p.m. 7:00 p.m.
If you're a fan of Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked may be just the novel you've been hoping for. Once again Hornby goes back to the popular themes reminiscent of High Fidelity, from which most of us first fell in love with him--a music-obsessive middle-aged man in a messy relationship, rock 'n' roll, manic fandom, and loneliness.
The novel focuses around Duncan and Annie, a couple who live in the fictional English countryside town of Gooleness. Duncan is positively obsessed with an American rock 'n' roll star Tucker Crowe, who since the 80s has been off the radar and a complete recluse. We first meet Duncan and Annie as they are taking a holiday in America to travel to all of the places that are known as influential parts of Crowe's career--a toilet in a Minneapolis dive bar where Crowe supposedly decided to quit music while "having a pee," the Berkeley house of the woman after whom Crowe named his all-time biggest-selling break-up album, Juliet, and so on.
Duncan deems himself a devout "Croweologist," and it is obvious early on that his obsession comes before anything else in his life, including his relationship or himself. Hornby describes Duncan's relationship with Crowe: "Tucker Crowe was his life partner....If Tucker was the husband, then Annie should somehow have become the mistress...."
It is also obvious that Duncan and Annie are not in love. Though they've been together for 15 years, the relationship is out of convenience and companionship rather than romance. As Hornby says, "Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who'd come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years....They had been introduced by mutual friends who could see that, if nothing else, they could talk about books and music, go to films, travel to London occasionally to see exhibitions and gigs."
When the couple returns from their trip, you slowly see their relationship take turns for the worse--or the better. After the release of Juliet, Naked, the acoustic version of Juliet, Tucker Crowe comes out of hiding and into their daily lives, changing them in ways they would have never imagined.
For anyone reading this who is in-the-know when it comes to music, there are plenty of draws on real-life artists for you to think about. We found ourselves wondering if the title of the album and the book was a play on The Beatles' Let it Be, Naked. You will also love the detail that Hornby put into Tucker Crowe's presence on the internet, such as the fake Wikipedia page and Duncan's website for the Croweologists that is named after one of Crowe's songs. The book is so true to the times we live in--an era where everyone looks to the internet for their gossip, facts, and autobiographical information.
Though Hornby is satirizing obsessive fandom, it also seems as if he is throwing it a celebration party. And really, sometimes there is only a fine line distinguishing stalker behavior from that of an adoring fan, but, as Tucker Crowe puts it, "If you wanted to get into people's living rooms, could you then object if they wanted to get into yours?" Throughout the book Hornby reminds us that we too have our quirks and obsessions, which is why seeing the dissection of the idea in Juliet, Naked is so fun and geeky and hilarious--because we understand it so well. And for that matter, it is the same reason why High Fidelity became so widely popular--we can relate. (That and the fact that John Cusack is AWESOME.)
This was the first Hornby novel that we'd ever read, and we can understand why he has such a strong following. Not to discount Juliet, Naked in any way--it is a good book. Hornby definitely hooked us towards the middle, where, frankly, we had a hard time putting it down, feeling the urgent need to keep reading right on until the end--which we did. But maybe that was where we felt a little cheated. The first half of the novel sews everything together perfectly, giving all the necessary details for you to fall in love and judge the characters adequately--the interesting storyline relaying how they all came to be in their present situation. And then something happened in the second half of the book for us that just seemed flat, or possibly unresolved. Since this was our first Hornby read, we couldn't help but wonder "Is this how all of his books are? Is this one of the factors for which people love him so much, and are we just missing it?"
And maybe we are, but still, we couldn't help feeling a little bit tricked. Once we got to the middle of the novel, it was as if the two of us had made an agreement, and then that agreement was not quite lived up to. Regardless, like we said, the book is good--so good that possibly the first half just really superseded the second. The characters are witty and crazy and weird in every way needed for this story, and dammit, the last two pages are downright hilarious. If anything, our feelings about the ending just made us that much more curious to go read Hornby's other work.
