Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
Four stars
I love Nick Hornby. His novels aren’t serious and deep, and he obviously isn’t trying to win a brand-name literary prize or reaching the pinnacle of the literary pecking order. He’s just very good at the basic job of a novelist: creating characters who are real that his readers will care about and involving them in a realistic plot that reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Here his main character is Annie, a 39-year-old woman living in a nowhere seaside town in the north of England who wonders how she ended up spending the last 15 years of her life with Duncan. Duncan is a dweeb who teaches at the local college and obsessively chronicles on a website the life and lyrics of Tucker Crowe, an American rocker who bailed on his career at the height of his success promoting a album entitled Juliet 22 years earlier. The story opens with Annie and Duncan on a Crowe pilgrimage in America: to the home where he was born in Bozeman, MT; to the house in Berkeley where Crowe’s Juliet lived; to the Minneapolis bar bathroom where he decided to call it quits on music. They return to England to find that a promoter has mailed them the demo of a new Crowe album called Juliet Naked, and after their different takes on the album — Annie’s reasoned thumbs down and Duncan’s delirious thumbs up — go live on the Crowe website, havoc ensues. Duncan falls into a relationship with a new colleague and Annie falls into an email flirtation with Crowe. If a woman had written this book, it would be marketed as a contemporary romance, and that’s what it is. Hornby leaves out the cute stuff that’s required in a rom-com, and the finally-getting-together scene happens off the page, but he delivers the obligatory happily-ever-after.
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