The Barnes & Noble Review
Imagine, if you will, that the record store clerks of Nick Hornby's classic 1996 homage to music fandom have aged a few years past the cusp of 40. Instead of top five lists, they have a single obsession: a reclusive singer-songwriter from the eighties named Tucker Crowe, who, soon after releasing his magnum opus, Juliet, an ode to a failed adulterous romance with a beautiful Los Angeles scenester ("a darker, more fully realized collection of songs than Blood on the Tracks"), is last seen walking out of public toilet in a Minneapolis rock club and never records again. Rather than bullying the uninitiated masses with the poor fortune to wander into their store, these guys have the Internet, where they are free to spend most their days swapping trivia and ill-gotten photographs, and analyzing song lyrics in the privacy of their own self-policing superfandom.
If you now imagine being the long-suffering girlfriend of one of these dudes, you are a long way to understanding the tension at the heart of Hornby's fifth novel, a charming and satirical ode to the pleasures of art and the dangers of loving another's art just a little too much.
Despite being the very definition of an insufferable blowhard, Duncan, the superfan, is the funniest and most pitch-perfect character in the novel. This is the kind of guy whose idea of going on holiday is to drag his girlfriend first to Minneapolis, on a search for clues in the aforementioned public toilet, then to San Francisco, where he ditches her to spend the day casing out the last-known residence of Crowe's long-estranged lover, Juliet Beatty. As he does so, he congratulates himself for being a more "serious" fan than the lone teenager engaged in the same activity because he, unlike the teen, is able to cite Crowe's influences -- "Dylan and Leonard Cohen, of course, but also Dylan Thomas, Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Shelly, the Book of Job, Camus, Pinter, Beckett and early Dolly Parton" -- though he must acknowledge to himself that "people who didn't understand all this might look at them and decide, erroneously, that they were similar. Both of them had the same need to stand in front of fucking Juliet's house, for example." Though Duncan, a middle-aged professor, has a few other interests -- 1970s American cinema, the novels of Nathanael West, The Wire -- everything else is just a "flirtation": "Tucker Crowe was his life-partner. If Tucker Crowe were to die -- to die in real life, as it were, rather than creatively -- Duncan would lead the mourning." (He has, naturally, already prepared the obituary).
This doesn't sit particularly well with the person who seems to be his actual life partner, Annie, who feels "less like a girlfriend than a school chum who'd come to visit on the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years." As two of the few liberal arts graduates in a sleepy seaside English town called Gooleness -- at each mentionof it I could hear Morrissey crooning about "the seaside town / they forgot to close down" -- they were matched up by friends in a sort of "arranged marriage" in their early 20s, then "stayed like that forever, stuck in a perpetual postgraduate world where gigs and books and films mattered more to them than they did to other people of their age." At 39, Annie works at the local museum, where she curates an exhibit on perhaps the most exciting year in the town's history, the summer of '64, when the Stones played and a 25-foot shark washed up on the local beach and died. But she is beginning to feel that all their free time is "sort of...decadent" and idly wishes for a child, though "neither of them would have felt comfortable applying cement to their relationship in that way."
Enter Tucker Crowe to disturb their torpor. By chance, Annie is the only one at home when the postman comes bearing Duncan's Holy Grail, a freshly released promo CD of a stripped-down version of Juliet, suitably named Juliet Naked. In a fit of disobedience, she listens to it first. She is right to assume that Duncan will take this as an act of "naked aggression," but then she commits an even more unpardonable sin: She finds it boring ("like listening to one of those people you've never heard of who comes onstage at lunchtime in a folk festival"). Naturally Duncan, following the music geek's rule that a track's genius is in direct ratio to its obscurity, finds the record revelatory and takes Annie's indifference to it as, in her words, "a moral failing" and a "character weakness." Annie, in a rare act of spunk, posts her dissenting opinion next to Duncan's on the Crowe fan site (though he remains skeptical that she is "qualified" to match the "expertise" of his fellow Internet Crowologists).
Here's where things get good: Tucker Crowe, the genius, as it turns out, is now a stay-at-home Little League dad of a six-year-old boy, living in suburban Pennsylvania, and supported by his much younger wife. The wild-eyed, bearded man thought to be Crowe by Duncan and his cronies is actually Crowe's neighbor, formerly known as Farmer John, who, since being captured on camera by a crazed Crowe fan who mistook him for his hero, is now known as Fucker (for "Fake Tucker," a nickname even funnier when it comes out of the mouth of Crowe's six-year-old, Jackson). Annie learns all this when Crowe, who prefers her seemingly blasphemous review to Duncan's, strikes up an email romance with her. Meanwhile, the world's leading Crowologist, disillusioned by his tone-deaf girlfriend, takes a stab at having his first-ever affair, choosing a henna-haired colleague.
Once one realizes that the narrative train seems to be headed toward a fanboy being cuckolded by his true "life partner," the notion is so delicious that one can forgive a few rom-com-ready sleights of hand. One tries not to think to hard about the silliness of both Annie and Tucker being conveniently ditched by their unfaithful partners within 24 hours of one another or to wonder aloud if a 55-year-old "serial husband" whose six-year-old son is already obsessed with his father's impending mortality is really the best partner for a 39-year-old childless woman. Instead, one can cackle with wicked appreciation when Duncan laments, "If you imagined it all as a department store, he was in basement, with the lamps and the dishes; the Juliets were all in Ladies Intimates, a couple of escalator rides away" -- all the while not knowing that the lamp he recently cast off is on the fast track to possibly becoming his hero's new Juliet.
Hornby has the grace and restraint to duck out while the fate of all of his characters are still an open question: In the words of Tucker: "The truth about life is was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you." But once again, he's crafted a perfect pop song of a novel: Warm and funny, with a disarmingly familiar chorus of voices that disguises just how difficult this kind of act is to pull off. --Amy Benfer
Amy Benfer has worked as an editor and staff writer at Salon, Legal Affairs, and Paper magazine. Her reviews and features on books have appeared in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Believer, Kirkus, and The New York Times Book Review.
From Barnes & Noble
Nick Hornby's Juliet Naked fulfills expectations with its story of Tucker Crowe, a rock singer-songwriter who secured his legend two decades ago when he disappeared mid-set during a concert and retired to rural Pennsylvania: "no new recordings, no gigs, no interviews." Though out of sight, Tucker is not out of mind. His non-career is being tracked closely by self-proclaimed "Croweologists," not least among whom are ex-lovers Duncan and Annie. It is their breakup and Crowe's unexpected resurgence that propels this novel forward in ways that only Hornby fans will even begin to suspect.
From the Publisher
From the beloved New York Times- bestselling author, a quintessential Nick Hornby tale of music, superfandom, and the truths and lies we tell ourselves about life and love.
Annie loves Duncan-or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn't. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life.
In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they've got. Tucker's been languishing (and he's unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin-his young son, Jackson. But then there's also the new material he's about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet-entitled, Juliet, Naked.
What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one's promise.
The Washington Post -
Ron Charles
Nick Hornby's charming new novel about love and music, sounds like a song we've heard before, but who's complaining? After all, we always expect Bruce Springsteen to sound like Bruce Springsteen, and we want him to play "Glory Days" over and over again. In the same spirit, Juliet, Naked echoes the melodies we know from High Fidelity, Hornby's breakout novel…about a lovelorn music fanatic. Nobody captures the zealous devotion and bizarre intensity of amateur music snobs better…He gently satirizes rockaphiles in a way that only endears him to them, and though this new novel will appeal to a broad audience for romantic comedy, anyone with a fading poster of Van Morrison will hum along, too.
The New York Times -
Janet Maslin
In maneuvering and manipulating these characters, Mr. Hornby…is on safe and inviting terrain. He knows all about the get-a-life pop-cultural obsessive who can devote himself to the study of someone else's career and declare himself a "world expert" on the subject…A more treacly writer than Mr. Hornby would engineer new happiness for…these characters. But in its diffident way, Juliet, Naked is as candid as the unplugged music on "Naked." It knows its characters too well to lie about them.
Allison Block
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Booklist
Hornby's characters may be marinated in melancholy, but there's always a ray or two of hope. He brings together a compelling, original cast in this sweet and sorrowful tale of rock 'n' roll and love on the rocks. Tucker Crowe is a has-been American musician, destined to fade into obscurity save for a handful of devoted listeners. Scholar Duncan Thomson is one of the loyal (a "Croweologist," as it were). Duncan's dedication to his musical hero far exceeds his interest in his significant other, Annie, who wonders whether the 15 years she's spent with Duncan in a bleak English seaside town have been the biggest mistake of her life. The release of an acoustic version of Crowe's best-known album, Juliet, sparks an e-mail correspondence between Tucker and Annie, and the two strangers revel in a candor each is able to exercise for the first time in their lives. Annie starts to see her relationship with Duncan for the dead-end that it is; Tucker begins to acknowledge his failures both as a musician and father (he has children from several different women, mostly models, wouldn't you know?). Englishman Hornby, whose many best-selling and award-winning books include A Long Way Down (2005), is a master at rendering romantic relationships, particularly those that seem broken beyond repair. Fans of High Fidelity (1995), perhaps Hornby's most popular book, will enjoy this related take on the lives of the musically obsessed. A wise, witty, and bittersweet novel.
"High Fidelity" will always be in our top five list. And writer Nick Hornby will be the author we turn to when we want complete engagement.
Library Journal
Fans of Hornby's light but filling High Fidelity will be excited to learn of his return to a pop culture-infused story about mucked-up modern romance. Nearing middle age in a dingy English seaside town, Annie pines for children but has no future with longtime boyfriend Duncan, who channels all his passion into a web site dedicated to an obscure American singer/songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Change comes, kerblam!, when Annie posts a brilliant pan of Juliet, Naked, a stripped-down version of Crowe's breakup masterpiece album. Duncan, bored and threatened, cheats on Annie; Crowe, now fiftysomething, living in obscurity in rural Pennsylvania, and depressed about messing up his upteenth relationship, begins an email flirtation with Annie. Fast-forward to London, where our transatlantic correspondents meet after Tucker is summoned there to attend to an estranged daughter after a miscarriage. VERDICT Hornby narrowly avoids a schmultzfest but leaves readers with too many questions about what happened between Annie and Tucker. The author's deft humor is mostly absent in what boils down to a well-intentioned rejection of Cupid as panacea that seems to have overwhelmed its creator. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]—Heather McCormack, Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
British woman finds herself in an intimate e-mail relationship with the obscure '80s rock star her music-obsessed ex idolizes. Annie can understand liking American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe. After all, his masterful breakup album, Juliet, is one of her favorites. The problem is that her longtime live-in boyfriend Duncan (an older, sadder version of Rob in Hornby's High Fidelity, 1995) lives and breathes Tucker Crowe, to the exclusion of having an actual grown-up life. After 15 years, Annie realizes she has wasted her childbearing prime tied to a man who feels more passion for a reclusive musician than he could ever muster for her. Duncan then makes it easy for Annie to kick him out by cheating on her with Gina, a new performing-arts instructor at the school where he teaches. In the meantime, Annie has inadvertently begun a web correspondence with Tucker himself, who finds her through an astute post she leaves on one of Duncan's geeky fan sites. The years have not been kind to Tucker, who lives in suburban Pennsylvania with his young son. His life bears little resemblance to the legend that has grown up around his disappearance more than 20 years earlier. Their meaningful exchanges awaken feelings in Annie that she had nearly given up on, while also giving her a vicarious thrill over one-upping Duncan. Tucker likes her too, finding her wit and kindness refreshing after years of chasing models. Living in a sleepy English seaside town, Annie has little hope of actually meeting her correspondent, but when a family drama brings Tucker to London, she sees an opportunity for adventure-and more. Tucker arrives, personal baggage in tow, and what happens next transforms both their lives inways they could not have anticipated. Few can match the muted humor, lingering poignancy and depth with which Hornby (A Long Way Down, 2005, etc.) limns his forgivably human characters.
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