Review: Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby

My spouse is on a Hornby glom — we’ve got copies of High Fidelity, About A Boy, Fever Pitch and How to Be Good floating around the house — but nothing interested me until I heard the plot for Juliet, Naked (2009): Annie and Duncan live together companionably but without passion on the east coast of England. She’s a curator at the local museum, and he’s a teacher who lives for his leadership position in a tiny but rabid internet fandom devoted to American musician Tucker Crowe, who has been in hiding for twenty years. When a package arrives that contains a copy of Juliet, Naked, a demo version of Crowe’s biggest record, Annie decides to mount the first salvo in her rebellion against Duncan’s smug tyranny of taste in film, TV and books: she listens to it before he gets home from work. Outraged at her “malevolence”, Duncan nevertheless has work to do: he listens to it himself, several times, sometimes while crying, and then writes a long glowing post on his message board about the album: “Juliet, Naked means that everything else Tucker Crowe recorded is suddenly a little paler, a little too slick, a little too digested … And if it does that to Crowe’s work, imagine what it does to everyone else’s.”

In a moment of clarity, Annie, who thought Juliet, Naked was mediocre at best, radically revises her estimation of Duncan — and herself:

It wasn’t that he made her feel incompetent and unsure of herself and her tastes. It was the reverse. He knew nothing about anything, and she’d never really allowed herself to notice it until now. She’d always thought that his passionate interest in music and film and books indicated intelligence, but of course it didn’t have to indicate anything of the sort, if he constantly got the wrong end of the stick. Why was he teaching trainee plumbers and future hotel receptionists how to watch American television, if he was so smart? Why did he write thousands of words for obscure websites that nobody read? And why was he so convinced that a singer nobody had ever paid much attention to was a genius to rival Dylan and Keats? Her partner’s brain was dwindling away to nothing while she examined it. And he’d called her a moron! One thing he was right about, though: Tucker Crowe was important, and he revealed harsh truths about people. About Duncan, anyway.

She recognizes that Duncan’s review was meant more to prove his connection to Crowe’s “people”, his superiority to other fans, and his genius, than to share his love of music with fellow fans. She  decides to type a rebuttal on the website, which Duncan grudgingly posts, and receives, to her shock, a lot of positive comments from the regulars. In her private email, a short but grateful note appears from the reclusive Crowe himself.

As the book unfolds, it becomes the story of Annie and the story of Tucker, but not in the way you might think (“overly patient woman realizes she deserves more, jilts self-centered boob, rescues drifting, washed up rocker, lives happily ever after”). My sense, talking to my husband, and seeing three film adaptations, High Fidelity, About a Boy and Fever Pitch (the one with Colin Firth, not the one with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler Jimmy Fallon), is that Hornby is very interested in a certain kind of male midlife stuckness as it intersects with some kind of obsessive fandom (music, soccer, etc.), and Juliet, Naked certainly continues with that theme. Duncan is a mostly unsympathetic, self-centered boy-man, whose character doesn’t change much, if at all. But Tucker is stuck more in the way that the Hugh Grant character in About A Boy was, not due to obsessive fandom, but just a crippling inability to take stock of unfulfilled promise, a fear that moving on will mean letting go — of nothing, but still, and a kind of lazy, self-induglence that is inherently masculine. Tucker, who has been hiding out in rural Pennsylvania, has a string of exes and five kids, and has to come to terms with all of it.

An interesting twist is the way the internet amplifies the perils and promise of human connection, especially among fandoms. What would the John Cusack or Colin Firth character in those films (sorry for not reading the novels) have been like with the internet? I confess that I saw a bit of myself in Duncan, especially the way he deifies his knowledge of something pretty obscure and unimportant  … a not very comfortable feeling. The way that Duncan reacts when he finally meets his idol is a mini-treatise on many of the questions about substance and surface, identity and fluidity, authenticity and fakeness that internet culture forces us to ask. But it’s not just about internet fandom: Annie and Tucker’s relationship unfolds via email as well:

Dear Annie,

I’m sending this email about five minutes after the last one. My advice, it now occurs to me, was entirely worthless and borderline offensive. I suggested that we can redeem wasted time by cherishing and nurturing our children, but you don’t have any children. Which is one of the reasons why you feel you’ve been wasting time. I’m not quite as perverse or obtuse as it might seem, but I can see that my pitch to be your guru could have gone better.

She has to decide: does she trust him? Is this really him? Can he trust her? What happens when an online relationship or connection becomes a real one, as it does for Tucker, Annie, and Duncan?  And what is “real”? The image of a person built up by others, or his self-image? Or neither? Or both? This last set of questions arises in particular in relation to Tucker’s musical legacy: has he made anything enduring and worthwhile? Who is to judge? Who is responsible for artistic creation? What, in terms of human connection, has been sacrificed to keep a musical “legend” intact?

I found this book to be a very astute reflection on relationships, digital and otherwise, especially the way a seemingly harmless long term relationship can suddenly look suffocating and even kind of horrific. There’s definitely a melancholic tone, an awareness that we get into ruts and can’t make up for lost time when we finally emerge from them, but Juliet, Naked is still a very, very funny book. Everything about the clueless Duncan is pretty funny, or it would be if Annie wasn’t such a sympathetic (maybe too sympathetic, my only complaint about the book) character. And Annie’s relationship with her inept, judgmental therapist had me the laughing out loud. In one scene, Annie decides to have some fun, and heads out to the pub with her friend Ros, who is gay, where they meet Gav and Barnesy, two “Northern Soul” dancers:

“A lesbian?” said Gav. “A real one? In Gooleness?”

“She’s not a lesbo,” said Barnesy.

“How can you tell?” said Gav.

“It’s just what birds say when they don’t like the look of you. Do you remember those two at the Blackpool all-nighter? Told us they weren’t into men, and then we saw them with their tongues down the throats of the DJs.”

Ros laughed. “I’m sorry if it seems like a brush-off, ” she said. “But I was gay long before you two walked in.”

“Fucking hell,” Barnesy said in wonderment. “You just walk around, gay, like.”

“Yep.”

“I’ve got to tell you,” said Gav, with sudden excitement. “I …”

“You don’t have to tell me at all,” said Ros.

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“You were going to say that, even though gay men make you sick to your stomach, the idea of gay women you find titillating in the extreme.”

“Oh,” said Gav. “You’ve heard that before, have you?”

“How does that work, anyway? said Barnesy. “If one of you’s gay and the other one isn’t?

There is much more to the book than I’ve mentioned here. In particular, I was so impressed with the way a central mystery, set in the bathroom of a Minneapolis club (the opening line is “They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet.”) managed to be ridiculous, funny, trivial, intriguing, banal, meaningless, significant, and, moving, all at once, kind of like this book.

I’m on to How to Be Good next.

Related posts:

1. When a DNF doesn’t mean “this book sucks”: Juliet Dark’s The Demon Lover
2. Naked In Death, The Worst Romance Ever Written
3. Review: Two Erotic Romance Shorts by Jackie Barbosa
4. Review: Instant Attraction, by Jill Shalvis