Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby - a review by Mary Duenwald

Unplugged

By Mary Duenwald

JULIET, NAKED

By Nick Hornby

406 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95

Nick Hornby is again having fun with — making fun of — an obsessive music fan. What’s different now, 14 years after “High Fidelity,” is that fans live out their obsessions on the Internet, a place where distances shrink, time collapses, and it’s very easy to get lost. Hornby seems, as ever, fascinated by the power of music to guide the heart, and in this very funny, very charming novel, he makes you see why it matters.

The music at the center of this tale is an album called “Juliet,” recorded more than 20 years earlier and considered by its dwindling number of listeners to be one of the greatest “breakup albums” of all time (along with Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love” and Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”).And as much fun as Hornby makes of the album’s individual song titles — beginning with “And You Are?” and “We’re in Trouble” and ending with “The 20th Call of the Day” and the embittered “You and Your Perfect Life” — we are meant to understand that it was in fact a set of really terrific songs.

Duncan, a teacher in the bedraggled English seaside town of Gooleness, has been a fan from the time “Juliet” was made, but only since the advent of the Internet has he been able to establish himself as a principal “scholar” of the album. “Until then, the nearest fellow fan had lived in Manchester, 60 or 70 miles away. . . . Now the nearest fans lived in Duncan’s laptop, and there were hundreds of them, from all around the world, and Duncan spoke to them all the time.” The Internet is a place where an album like “Juliet,” and Tucker Crowe, the American musician who made it, can live forever.

Duncan’s pseudo-intellectual, misinformed ­pronouncements about “Juliet” would be enough to expose him as a humorless fool. But he comes off even worse through the eyes of the other two main characters: Annie, the woman who has spent almost 15 years with him, and Tucker Crowe himself, now an aimless recovering alcoholic who ridicules the wildly misinformed “Crowologists” yet never stops paying attention to them.

All three characters have dark views of themselves, and Hornby relies mainly on their self-criticism to make you smirk. Tucker, finding himself corralled into a series of reunions with his estranged children, thinks he’s becoming an expert on “paternal reintroduction” and wonders whether he should run classes. Annie tries to work out an algebraic equation that can tell her exactly how many real years she’s wasted with Duncan. Yet Hornby still gets you to sympathize with each one’s earnest quest for some belated emotional maturity.

When, after decades of silence, Tucker allows the release of “Juliet, Naked,” a set of old solo acoustic demos of the songs on “Juliet,” Duncan rushes to be the first to praise it online.Annie, already irritated with Duncan for caring more about Tucker Crowe than her, bats back by posting an essay of her own, pointing out that “Naked” is nothing compared with the finished version. And so her breakup with Duncan begins. Meanwhile, breakups aplenty have been happening in Tucker Crowe’s life. Still cool enough, in his early post-rock-star years, to attract “deathly pale English models with cheekbones instead of breasts,” he has managed to have five children with four women. But by the time “Juliet, Naked” is released, he is living on a farm in Pennsylvania, a middle-aged P.T.A. dad, devoted to his sweetly neurotic 6-year-old son Jackson, the youngest of his offspring, and about to break up with Jackson’s mother. He spends his days reading everything Charles Dickens ever wrote (every­one’s an obsessed fan of something) and trying to make sense of his own existence.

Along with all the breakups come new connections — e-mail connections, to begin with — between Tucker and Annie, and eventually also Duncan, along with revelations about the breakup behind “Juliet” and why Tucker dropped out in the first place. Duncan and all the other Crow­ologists have had it all wrong, it’s no surprise to learn. But Tucker has misunderstood some things, too, as Hornby skillfully leads you to care. “You asked us to listen,” Duncan gets a chance to tell the former artist — along with a few other choice truths about the role that fans play in making music immortal.

Mary Duenwald is deputy editor of the Times Op-Ed page.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Duenwald-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3