Nick Hornby- Juliet, Naked

Nick Hornby, a British writer of some renown, has been made famous by his books, but also by the films made from his books. High Fidelity was translated into a John Cusak vehicle and moved to the US, About a Boy was one of the better Hugh Grant efforts and, though non-fiction, his Fever Pitch was made into a rollicking soccer film. Other novels include How to Be Good and the eerie A Long Way Down about a collection of misfits all considering suicide by jumping off a roof. There is no suicide here, though it seems likely that some of the characters in Juliet, Naked, would consider it if given half a reason more.

Annie has wasted fifteen years living without benefit of marriage or commitment with Duncan. Duncan, a nebbish sort of fellow, takes Annie to the US to follow the clues left in his music to the whereabouts of Tucker Crowe, a legendary pseudo-Dylan. The clues lead him to the bathroom of Julie Beatty, the alleged subject of an album called Juliet, Naked, Crowe’s last album. That Duncan christens the bathroom with his urine is a bit unusual in that he has to break into the house while she isn’t there. Annie is appalled, but Duncan is beginning to appall her more and more. When they get back, Duncan dumps her for a grad student named Gina and Annie realizes that it might be a good thing.

In the meantime, Tucker reads a review of Juliet, Naked, by Duncan and one by Annie on Duncan’s Tucker Crowe website and perversely contacts her rather than Duncan. As Duncan moves out of her life, Tucker moves in as a fantasy figure by email only.

The fantasy comes true when Tucker comes to London. In the process of coming to London the myriad details of the tale unfold. Crowe has uncountable families and wives with half-brothers and sisters in such profusion that he loses interest in all of them save one: Grace. He also has no interest in resuming his abandoned performing career. This is a novel of loneliness and wry despair. The wryness is probably why nobody commits suicide. The despair is caused by mismatches, emotional connections held tenuously and abandoned and the desire for new connections that might not be possible. In that it is an intensely romantic novel.

Hornby likes little male characters. Crowe’s son, Jackson, six, is the center of his life and provides many of the best moments in the story. But this is not a reprise of About a Boy in any way. It is the story of a man who, not knowing what he wants from life and having abandoned his genius, wanders through it genially enough but without much direction. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if he finds a new direction with Annie or, more to the point, when he finds it with Annie will it take him in a direction he wants to head?