Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is a return to form in my eyes to the high points of High Fidelity and About A Boy. I absolutely loved those books, so much so, that the muddled, incomprehensible mess that was How To Be Good, Hornby’s follow up to About A Boy, turned me off to everything he’s written since. I felt too burned and betrayed to even bother. However, I read some good reviews for Juliet, Naked and heard an NPR interview with Hornby that intrigued me enough to give it a chance.
Juliet, Naked is the story of Annie, who lives in a decaying British seaside resort town that’s best days are behind it. She has been living with Duncan, a professor of pop cultural studies at the local college, for the last 15 years. It is a relationship build on a foundation of limited options, compromise and inertia. While not fulfilling to Annie in the least, she has settled into a stagnant yet comfortable routine.
The true passion in Duncan’s life is a singer named Tucker Crowe, who is a sort of fictional equivalent of Jackson Browne or Nick Drake. Twenty-five years earlier he released "Juliet", considered among his fans and critics to be his greatest work and a classic break-up album on par with Bob Dylan’s "Blood On Tracks" or Derek & The Domino’s "Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs". Shortly afterward Crowe mysteriously walked away from it all, and hasn’t recorded or made any public appearances since. Duncan runs a website dedicated to Crowe’s music and considers himself a “Croweologist”. Duncan and his small band of online devotee’s dissect the minutia of Crowe’s life and music looking for any clues to explain the singer’s self-imposed seclusion.
When Crowe’s record company sends Duncan a pre-release copy of acoustic demo’s of the songs from "Juliet" entitled "Juliet, Naked", Annie intercepts it in the mail and passive aggressively writes a scathing review of it on Duncan’s website. A few days later she receives an e-mail from Crowe himself who has been living quietly in Pennsylvania for the past twenty years and who agrees with her assessment. That set’s up an online “affair” that drives the novel.
Hornby is at his best when he is examining his pet themes, the ennui produced by self doubt and the past that immobilizes people, and the collector mentality and how people substitute the obsessive compulsive love of things (records, movies) for real intimacy with people.
Where in High Fidelity, Hornby’s obsessive music geeks gathered in the social nexus of a record store to debate their endless top five lists, in Juliet, Naked, Duncan and his “Croweologists” know each other only by online screen names. Hornby perfectly illustrates the insular online message board mentality, were anonymous and far-flung fans endlessly debate the details of their chosen obsessions until reality and objectivity warp. I knew someone like Duncan, he was my roommate in college, and Hornby has that character and fan driven website culture down to a “T”. The boxes that people close themselves off in while feeling that they are part of a “community”, in which they can feel a part of something without actually having to venture out of the security of their bedroom. It also gets into the issue of intimacy online, and do you really know someone if your sole interaction is online?
Like Hornby himself, his characters are now either entering middle-age or on the cusp of it and facing the realities associated with that time of life. In High Fidelity and About A Boy, Rob Fleming and Will Freeman get second chances to right themselves from the corners they’ve backed themselves into, things are not that simple for Annie and Tucker. They are facing the reality that they’ve let decades slip by wasted, that their most productive years are gone and now they have to figure out what increasingly limited options they have left. The book has many instances of characters being stuck in past and how the world has an unforgiving way of moving on without them.
Juliet, Naked’s reality is a stark one for it’s characters, but the story is told with Hornby’s trademark humor and eye for pop-culture detail, both past and present. While not quite as good as High Fidelity or About A Boy, it’s entertaining, poignant, has something to say for itself and is worth a read.
