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...