Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby

In Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby has returned to the world of obsessive music fans. As the book opens, Duncan and Annie are in Minneapolis taking pictures of a bar restroom where fans of the 1980s folk-rocker Tucker Crowe believe he had a transformative experience that caused him to drop out of the music scene and become a recluse. Duncan is one of a small group of self-styled Crowologists who tour significant sites in Crowe's life and post endless analysis about Crowe and his music on a website devoted to the musician. Annie is clearly less enamored with all things Crowe, but in 15 years with Duncan has learned to go along.

When Duncan and Annie return to their tired seaside town in England, things are about to change. Duncan receives an advance copy of a new version of Crowe's greatest album (Juliet) consisting of acoustic demos of the songs (Juliet, Naked). Heady with the power of being first to review the album, he posts a rave on the site. Annie, meanwhile, thinks the album is worthless and decides to post her own more critical review. That act puts a major crack in Annie and Duncan's relationship and draws the attention of Tucker Crowe himself. Since he stopped making music, Crowe has essentially been doing nothing except marrying, having children, and moving on; as he enters the story, his latest marriage has just broken up, but he is deeply involved in raising his youngest child Jackson, an endearingly neurotic six-year-old.

Much more happens as the narrative leads toward a meeting between Duncan and Tucker, but those events are best discovered as you read the book rather than as you read my review. Suffice it to say that Hornby injects humor in a wide array of situations and characters while also prompting some reflection on the meaning of authenticity in life and in art. After reading a few book lately in which the authors seemed to be trying very hard to be funny, I appreciated this book because Hornby finds the humor in life rather than simply adding quirks to try to provoke a laugh (although there are plenty of quirks--but somehow they feel more authentic than in other writers' work).

I thoroughly enjoyed Juliet, Naked.

Favorite passages:

And he [Tucker Crowe] was beginning to learn that some of his children always reintroduced themselves to him at some big watershed moment, either in their own lives or in the lives of their mothers, and that tended to weigh the visits down somewhat. He was trying to cut down on introspection, so he really didn't need to import it.

We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sand castles? She [Annie] would waste the next two hours, because she had to, and then she would never waste another second of however much time she had left to her. Unless somehow she ended up living with Duncan again, or doing this job for the rest of her working life, or watching EastEnders on a wet Sunday, or reading anything that wasn't King Lear, or painting her toenails, or taking more than a minute to choose something from a restaurant menu, or . . . It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.

That was why she [Annie] wanted children too. The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn't be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents.

Tucker liked to think that he was reasonably honest with himself; it was only other people he lied to.