Juliet, Naked

I gave my husband a (requested) David Gray CD for Christmas, but we were away for the holiday and then he had to go back to work earlier than I, and blah, blah, blah...the CD was sitting unopened on the kitchen counter. Without thought, I ripped open the package, popped it into the player and then thought, uh-oh. This seemingly mundane act echoed the tipping point in Annie and Duncan's relationship in Nick Hornby's excellent Juliet, Naked.


Duncan is an obsessed mid-forties Brit who lives for any gleaning he can collect about his favorite cult-status American musician, Tucker Crowe. Annie is his long-term partner who lives for, well, um, she's not sure. Duncan gets the motherlode one day when the reclusive artist releases what are essentially demo tapes of his most famous album Juliet and the CD arrives in Duncan's mail slot. Annie gives it the first listen and suddenly everything that is wrong with her relationship with Duncan and her life in general comes out into the open. Words are said, competing analyses are written, affairs are occuring---although, as Duncan says: It's not...I wouldn't use the present continuous. There's been an, an incident. So 'Who have you slept with?' is probably the question. Or 'With whom did this possibly one-off incident take place?'"

No matter, the damage is done. Annie betrayed Duncan by being the first to listen to Tucker Crowe's miraculous delivery and then compounded the betrayal by not loving it. Duncan, more prosaically, sleeps with another woman. This is the state of things in Gooleness, a dreadful and dead English seaside town which Hornby describes thus: It wasn't much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown...The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they'd been bereaved that morning.
Duncan procedes to sit on said beach and weep over several listens of the "new" Crowe album, dubbed Juliet, Naked. Annie decides to leave Duncan.

In the meantime, the real Tucker Crowe is quietly, anonymously living on a farm in Pennsylvania, watching and waiting as his various lives--that is, the children of his many wives and/or girlfriends--traips through what's left of his current life. And then he reads Annie's online opinion of Juliet, Naked.

Yeah, the characters all come together eventually and I worried a little about how all this would work and whether all the characters would be more damaged at the end of the story than they already were. But then I remembered that I was reading Hornby. I love that his characters can be what appear to be complete losers and either they don't realize it (so it's not a rent-your-clothing tragedy) or, more often, he gives them some spark, some redeeming quality that makes their loser-ness bearable. Yep, you end up liking them. All of them. And you want everything to work out; you just don't know how it can or will.

I've read everything from Nick Hornby that I could get my hands on and I only hated (and boy, did I hate it) How to Be Good. I could never choose a favorite, though. I've gotten musical advice from his Songbook, book suggestions from his columns in The Believer (his essays are collected in books), a thorough education on Arsenal soccer, and I've enjoyed his fiction. It's considered 'lad fiction' but I'm not sure why because unlike, say, the movies of Judd Apatow and countless American TV ads for cleaning products, the men may be slouches and losers and doughy, but the women are flawed too and it makes sense as to why they put up with the men in their lives.

Nick Hornby is such a great and fun writer. Any modern writer that mentions a newel post gets bonus points in my book, but that's just me being clever. Here's Hornby being clever: Annie announces she's "met" someone and Duncan replies, "You're seeing somebody? I'm...well, I'm aghast." If ever Duncan wanted to know the reason why people sometimes found him insufferable, she could point him toward that description of his inner turmoil. Who used the word "aghast" without irony? And, yes, the word aghast comes up again later.

Honestly, I'm not doing justice to how fun this book is. The characters--and there are a lot of them--are all great. Annie's not-very-good shrink (she's his only patient), Gav and Barnsey, the local dance stars, the staff at Annie's museum, Duncan...All nice. Hornby has a good ear for late-thirties, early forties angst and voice. He's slightly less successful with the older and American Tucker Crowe, but I forgive him.

As for my David Gray transgression, it was never mentioned in this household. I'd have the perfect comeback, though. After all, my husband got to read Juliet, Naked before I did and I "discovered" Nick Hornby before he did...

Await Your Reply

I don't think I've ever done this, but I finished Dan Chaon's book Await Your Reply and flipped back to the front and read it again. Well, sort of. I admit I picked through it and no, it wasn't because I was totally confused (I wasn't). I did regret not being able to read Russian though that was irrelevent to my enjoyment (but I am taking along the passage on Friday when I see a Russian-reading friend just to make sure). No, I started the book over to see how all the parts fit together. I loved every moment I was reading this book, but I wanted to make sure I had understood it all.

Chaon tells the story of the lost in society. Or rather, of those trying to be lost and stay lost or become someone else, reinvent themselves, destroy their old selves, become new or better than they were. There's college student Ryan who is handed information about his past that totally changes everything he's ever believed. There's Lucy Lattimore, recent graduate of a midwestern high school who dreams of better things when she leaves town with her former teacher (okay, mostly she's thinking of money, but she's also escaping her orphan past, her "slow" sister with pet rats, and being called "Licey"). There's also Miles Cheshire, entering his thirties and still searching for his lost twin who may or may not be a criminal mastermind, who may or may not be schizophrenic, who may or may not have killed people and defrauded institutions, but is most certainly a part of Miles and of Miles' very ability to exist. These stories and lives eventually intertwine which I feared would be contrived, but about half-way through (right about the time I was wondering if Miles was the schizophrenic one and whether or not his twin Hayden actually existed) I decided it didn't matter if the story ever felt contrived because each character was so wonderful.

The disparate points of view suffer from the usual switching narration in that sometime you don't want to let go of a character or situation to wander off and read about another, but those moments are short-lived. The patience it requires to read such a book pays off well because Chaon's writing is so nice. I was intrigued by each story.

A short warning: Await Your Reply starts off with a severed hand. The story of just how that hand came to be severed--which you have to wait quite awhile for--is truly horrifying, but this event is an anomaly in the book. Await Your Reply is not a violent book, though it's not exactly a happy book either. It's a look at the world and what we want our role in it to be. It is, in a strange way, a book about family and connections we make to each other and our attempts to create families out of acquaintances. It was a little sad to read that Dan Chaon's wife died of ovarian cancer just as he finished the book and I can't help but wonder if some of the gloom that pervades this book is a reflection of that. This is not an unhappy book--characters more or less end up as they should or could--and if the pieces of the giant puzzle don't fall in just the way you think they should, read it again. See if you can figure it out.

I also highly recommend Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, though in looking back at it, I'm reminded of the sad elements in that book (primarily the story of the girl in the mid-sixties who's in a home of unwed mothers). Chaon's writing is strong and his characters always interesting. I'll get back to you all on that Russian.

The BEST of what I read 2009

Well, here it is, for what it's worth: The books I liked best this year. There's a lot I still haven't gotten to, either because I'm holding out for Christmas presents or there was a long hold wait at the library, or I just haven't had time.

These are in no particular order, but Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby has to go at the top of the list. I couldn't wait to read it so pretty much it was on my list as soon as I knew Hornby had a new book. I've only ever read one thing by him that I've not liked, so Juliet, Naked was the expected success. I just finished it so I'll do a write-up soon.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff

In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, by E. Lockhart

Ex Machina: The first Hundred Days (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (non-fiction)

The Secret to Happiness by Sarah Dunn

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Obviously, I've written these all up so you can look up a more thorough explanation of why these reads are so great.

I'm still looking forward to Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, even though I abandoned his last book (The Bridge of Sighs). Still love Straight Man too much to hold one book against him.
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon is also high on my list (and under the tree, I hope?) because I thought his You Remind Me of Me (2004) was brilliant.

I'm also going to throw in a few kids books that were popular in our house this year. I have to start with Mo Willem's Piggie and Elephant series, especially I will Surprise My Friend. This is a perfect book for early-ish readers but it's really fun to read out loud too. Kind of irreverent.
Speaking of irreverent, Jan Thomas is our new favorite picture book author. It's a battle between The Dog House and Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny. The pictures are fantastic and the story is silly and perfect to inspire even the most reluctant reader.

On the older front, my 4th grader laughed late into the night over Barbara Park's Skinnybones. He doesn't know anything about baseball, but he can relate to Alex, a smart mouthed kid who can't help but get himself into one scrape after another. It's a great fourth grade read, as is The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson. Yes, the over-the-top Herdmans from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever are back, but without all the potentially awkward-for-public-school religious bent (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Thanks for reading my posts this past year. I hope I've inpired some of you to pick up a few of these books along the way. Cheers.

The Audacity to Win

This isn't exactly a tell-all book. More like a tell-almost, for which I don't blame David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, because while honesty is a great thing, Obama still does have to work with a lot of the characters (Hillary Clinton, McCain, Biden...). On John Stewart, Plouffe said he was careful to be as honest and complete as he could because he felt that no matter how they voted, people would agree in the future that 2008 saw a historic election race and that there should be truth in the details. He says it better than I could here. So, yeah, read this for the inside scoop if you love campaign details, but not if you're looking for trash-talk about Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Reverend Wright or even Joe the Plumber. It's not that they're not in The Audacity to Win, but they're not Plouffe's focus.

So what do you get in The Audacity to Win? Well, it's a great story. Being from NH, elections are always huge for me, and this one in particular. I live literally around the corner (well, two corners, since I'm being literal) from the "coffee shop" in which Hillary cried and thus cemented her NH win in the primary. This was a devastating moment for we early Obama supporters, so I cringed a bit having to read this again, but I loved how philosophical Obama (and Plouffe) were at the unexpected loss. Plouffe quotes Obama as saying, " I actually think this is for the best...Sure, if we had won New Hampshire, we'd be in the driver's seat. But I'd be like a comet streaking across the sky. White hot. And comets eventually burn up...Now people can see how I deal with adversity, whether we can bounce back...And they want me to earn this. They don't want it to be so easy for someone like me and it probably shouldn't be."

Read this as arrogance, if you want, and some people will, but I see it more as a sign of how introspective and thoughtful Obama is. Throughout the book, this is how he comes off. Yes, he makes mistakes (flat debates in the beginning--he hated prep--some lines that came off wrong--the clinging to guns bit and the You're likeable enough, Hillary), but every time he could have gone the low road, Obama chose the high road. He never made hasty decisions. When he felt his campaign--in the heat of the action--failed his image of hope and change, he chastised them. But he also took responsibility for his own errors. He comes off as even more impressive in this book than I had already thought him.

Of course, Plouffe is a bit biased, but he does succeed in writing an "honest" book. He dances around the deep animosity between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp. He also hints strongly at their concern in picking Biden, that he would go off message too much and mangle things (as Biden himself admits he can. He was, after all, the one who first suggested Obama was a "clean" candidate, unintentionally implying this was unusual for an African-American). But Plouffe is clear that Biden and Hillary became formidable allies and he recognizes that.

There's a lot about the day-to -day stress of running a campaign and it made me more sympathetic to all those appeals for money we kept getting. This book brought back all the excitement and tension of the race, even while I read it with some sense of a 20/20 hindsight on the part of Plouffe. I liked the nitty-gritty stuff (skipped some of the numbers, though), loved the explanation of the delegate crunching the campaign did to win, and the role of the superdelegates. Lots of details, with humor occasionally thrown in (because, yeah, obviously they react to Sarah Palin). This is a great way to relive the highs (and, I suppose the lows, though who wants to relive those?) while getting interesting insight into a very unusual campaign and candidate. This would be a great gift for a political junkie on your list (um, unless he or she is wacky right- leaning and then I think you might want to go with a little book I've heard about that's coming out of Alaska).

On a completely unnecessary side note, I saw Plouffe read here in town (which was fascinating), but I was glad to find out his name is pronounced PLUFF because the way I'd been saying it in my head made the same sound as the French word for jumping into water. An apt enough metaphor for his taking on such an unorthodox candidate, but a distraction nonetheless.