Nick Hornby calls to mind a certain brand of cool, like taking a spin in a 1960 Austin Healey convertible. In his sixth novel, Juliet, Naked, out this week, Hornby thankfully sticks to his pet motifs: rock ‘n’ roll, obsession, fandom, sex and afflicted relationships.
The two main characters are Duncan and Annie, whose 15-year relationship is as gloomy and chilly as the small seaside town of Gooleness in northeast England where they reside. Duncan, fortyish and a bit of a geek, obsesses over the reclusive ‘80s singer/songwriter Tucker Crowe, who called it quits 22 years earlier.
The book opens with Duncan and Annie in the middle of their Tucker Crowe pilgrimage at a toilet in a Minneapolis bar, the spot where it all went down back in ‘86. Story has it that Crowe walked off stage in the middle of a show, ducked into the men’s bathroom, saw something and walked summarily out on the rest of the set, the tour and his career. He disappeared, never to make another public ap pearance.What happened next to that urinal, nobody is sure.
Upon returning from their trip across America, Duncan receives in the mail an advanced copy of Crowe’s Juliet, Naked, a raw, acoustic and lousy version of the masterpiece Juliet, considered the most sorrowful breakup album of all time.
Not a comeback, but an album culled from old studio tapes. Duncan pops in the disc, goes wild and posts a blubbering review on the Crowe website, where a few thousand fellow Croweologists—think Dylan freaks—across the planet chat, trade stories, churn up rumors and share trivia on all things Crowe.
Crowe’s career gets compared to that of Springsteen and Leonard Cohen, but is more reminiscent really of a Dan Fogelberg, who graced AM radio in the 1970s with a handful of pop songs.
Hornby stumbled upon the idea for his reclusive character after reading an article about the long-vanished rocker Sly Stone in Vanity Fair. Sly, the flamboyant front man for the funk band Sly and Family Stone, dropped off the planet back in ‘87 only to be tracked down many years later in Napa Valley by the article’s writer, who then put to rest some dark rumors: Sly was frail, a vegetable from years of drugs, or dead.
Much of the book wags a finger at the obsessive behavior of meddlesome fans who loll about on the Internet, the place where celebrity scuttlebutt thrives, like bacteria in warm water.The Croweologists have nearly every detail wrong from the number of children and ex-wives he has, to the locale of his exile, to the inspiration for his songs.To Hornby, such is the online community. In an interview, Hornby worries about the unsocial nature of the Web, where fans can chat about any subject anytime anywhere, in isolation from regular people. And there’s the inflated self-importance the Internet can impart on an artist. Hornby says, “I would rather chew off my own arm than Google my name.”
The book’s narrative unfolds a little like a VH1 biopic, but with Hornby’s firstrate storytelling, it reads something more in line with a BBC program. In the first half, we learn of Crowe’s shadowy life through Duncan. And later on, the reader is brought out to Crowe’s humdrum Pennsylvania routine where he gets a firsthand peek at the singer’s life and, thankfully, some light is shed on what happened in that Minneapolis bathroom.
The story takes a few likeable turns, like, when Annie, who grows to loathe Duncan’s obsession, posts her own review of the new schlocky album. Her bluntness earns her an email from Crowe, who happens to agree. A trans-Atlantic flirtation begins while Annie and Duncan’s relationship nosedives into the Irish Sea. Crowe finds his way to England, and they meet up. Meanwhile, Duncan bumps into the two and is introduced to his musical hero in the flesh, in Gooleness, but initially Duncan’s unconvinced because Crowe, with short hair and glasses, looks less like a rock star and more like an accountant.
Hornby compelled me to face my own musical obsessions, and at times I wondered what I would do if my wife and, say, Bob Dylan were in secret correspondence. I know, silly. But if Hornby is warning his readers, he’s saying our musical deities may want more than our money and adoration. They have an eye on our dates.
> Juliet, Naked
Nick Hornby, Riverhead, 416 pages
