At least three of Nick Hornby’s books – High Fidelity, About A Boy, and Songbook are on my list of favorite books. I see a lot of myself in their nerdy neuroses and self-destruction and redemptive epiphanies that are inexorably (I use this word a lot, I think) tied to music. Hornby’s other novels are less resonant (and then there’s How To Be Good, whose ending made me phyisically angry – less because it was unsatisfying and more because I wanted it to validate me the way all the prior books did, thus leaving me mad and disappointed), and so I approached his latest - Juliet, Naked – with more than a bit of trepidation. I actually passed it over on a handful of bookstore trips before finally buying it. Once I did, I read it quickly.
The novel juxtaposes the lives of Annie, a former teacher in a small seaside town in northern England, and Tucker Crowe, a retired, washed-up singer-songwriter who reads like a mashup of Dylan, Leonard Cohen and John Cale. Annie’s long-time boyfriend Duncan is a “Crowologist,” an obsessive fan of Tucker’s, who runs a Crowe website frequented by a small number of hardcore fans who can’t let go of the artist, despite his retreat into reclusivity in 1986. When Annie gets to listen to Juliet, Naked – a stripped-down, acoustic version of Tucker Crowe’s final album Juliet*, it begins the rapid dissolution of her life with Duncan and connects her to Tucker himself, who reaches out to her after finding her scathing review of the album online.
Predictably, Naked is about Annie and Tucker, two lonely people with lives that have been chronically misspent in drastically different ways, finding themselves by finding each other. There is much made in the book of love not being a great transformative power in the characters’ lives, but it’s a folly to think that the central characters don’t transform and that love isn’t a factor in it – it’s just not something that love causes as if by magic.
That’s the plot, but the novel is about stultification, that sense of just doing nothing but wearing the same ruts in our lives down further and further. It’s everywhere in the book, from Annie and Duncan’s 15-year partnership of convenience to the banal indifference of Annie’s small town of Gooleness to Tucker’s decades of stalled creativity. Although it takes a different tack than How To Be Good does, Naked deals with the same frustration: that you’ve reached a certain age and that this is all you have, all you’ve done, an ailment that strikes rockers, museum curators and obsessive fanboys equally. Mostly, the book doesn’t answer how that realization is dealt with; rather, like Hornby novels tend to, it lets the characters luxuriate on the issue and think at it from every direction in an entertainingly unbalanced fashion.
Juliet, Naked is a quick and engaging read from Hornby, but it’s not one of his best. However, it’s a strong improvement over his most recent fiction and is definitely worth reading for Hornby fans and music fans alike.
*A wink at the controversially de-Spector-ized Let It Be…Naked
