What's that coming yonder way this week? Why it's Octo-Month! I love the little wiggle in its walk...
Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby
"[Nick] Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent, and emotionally generous all at once,” notes the New York Times Book Review. “He combines a skilled, intuitive appreciation for the rigors of comic structure with highly original insights about the way the enchantments of popular culture insinuate themselves into middle-class notions of romance."
For those of us less witty, intelligent, and emotionally generous who once eked out an existence as record store clerks and managers and who related perhaps a bit too much, in personal life and career choice, to Hornby’s 1995 music shop schematic High Fidelity – well, maybe a few other things were insinuating themselves into us, and by extension, multitudes of music fans. As Hornby remarks in High Fidelity:
“Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives."
Now there’s cause for a new examination, from a different angle, about rock obsession and the need for emotional rescue – another illumination of “Lovers laughing in their amateur hour,” to cite Elvis Costello from his original “High Fidelity.” Nick Hornby’s newest novel Juliet, Naked sees one of the main characters Annie brooding as her childbearing years are dwindling in an English seaside town, but also sulking about her relationship – or lack thereof --with longtime boyfriend Duncan, who directs all his time, energy, and devotion to a website dedicated to reclusive has-been singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe. Storyline wheels are set in motion, though, when Annie posts a scathing pan of Juliet, Naked, a stripped-down version of Crowe's breakup masterpiece album. Just to make sure there’s no blood left on the tracks, an angry and threatened Duncan cheats on Annie with a new performing-arts instructor at the school where he teaches.
Fiftysomething Crowe, unrecognizable and living in obscurity with his son Jackson in suburban Pennsylvania, and depressed about messing up his upteenth relationship with yet another model, emerges enough from his 15-year disappearing act to begin an email back-and-forth with Annie. The substantive and witty exchanges spark reciprocal feelings that each find appealing. Though there is little hope that Annie can meet with her correspondent, when a family drama brings Tucker to London, she sees an opportunity for… well, I don’t know if you'd call it silly love songs (not that there’s anything wrong with that: “Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time." —High Fidelity). But in Juliet, Naked’s thematic linkage of music, love, and loneliness, there are certainly expectations from Hornby, the "maestro of the male confessional," of a relationship forged, adept humor expanded, and a decided depth of poignancy. In any case, maybe we'll see Tucker and Annie creating some new glory days instead of having to hide 'neath the covers and study their pain.
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