About a fanboy

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is an
ode to Internet losers

by JULIET WATERS

In a book review he wrote for The Believer, Nick Hornby compared two visions of Baltimore. There’s the one we see in the gritty, endlessly disappointing streets of The Wire and then there’s the quiet, guardedly happy one we find in Anne Tyler novels. Hornby doesn’t dispute the brilliance and the honesty of the HBO series. But he’s solidly in the Anne Tyler camp. He quotes John Updike: “But how honest, really, is a world picture that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last?”

This is the world picture that drives his latest novel Juliet, Naked. It’s a novel that is initially about losers, specifically those created by the Internet. Losers who get so lost in a world of virtual community that they destroy the messier, more difficult connections that give life its real vitality. And despite the feelgood vibe of that Updike quote, Hornby is pretty brutal here in his description of a life gone moribund.

Duncan is the kind of obsessive fan we have come to know from other Hornby books like High Fidelity and Fever Pitch. He is the worldwide expert on all things Tucker Crowe, a highly respected fictional singer-songwriter who mysteriously dropped out of the music world just when he was peaking in the mid-’80s.

Crowe is best known for Juliet, widely considered one of the greatest break-up albums ever written. Or at least it is in the alternate reality Wikipedia world which Hornby has obviously had a lot of fun creating. According to his faux wiki page, Crowe had a rough start in his early career, receiving a merciless review from Greil Marcus. But he turned it around with the savage four-track E.P, Can Anybody Hear Me?, which is “now the name of a website given over to earnest, sometimes pompous, discussion of his music.”

This is of course the website run by Duncan. As Duncan’s perceptive and long suffering girlfriend Annie comments to a friend, “Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple of dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn’t recorded in 20 years gets talked about every day. It’s what the Internet’s for. That and pornography.”

But Hornby is too smart to make the Internet just a distraction that kills people’s lives and turns them into chronic parasites feeding off the meta-misery of real artists. The Internet can in fact create real connections; and so it’s the Internet that turns their lives around.

Because of the new surge of interest in Crowe’s art, his record company has decided to release Juliet’s original demo tapes. To get a buzz going, they send them to Duncan. In a bitter mood, Annie decides to go ahead and listen to them before Duncan gets home, which leads to their break-up. And which also leads to the series of circumstances that put Annie and Tucker Crowe in touch.

Here the novel shifts to the sad and desperate life of a blocked artist and serial monogamist, and Hornby grooves into the material he’s best at, the atrophied lives of charming and talented men who piss it all away. Duncan fades into a minor character and Crowe and Annie start a probably doomed, but potentially transformative romance.

This isn’t to say that Duncan has nothing to add to the story. He does, in fact, have his triumphant moments as a critic. But unfortunately, they seem to happen in private. When he contemplates Juliet, Naked for the first time, he’s sensitive enough to hear a foreshadowing doom that isn’t in the produced versions. But by the time he writes his thoughts down, he’s overcooked them into hype.

Sadly he’s not attuned enough to hear the foreshadowing doom in his own life. So the story belongs to those who are.

JULIET, NAKED BY NICK HORNBY,
RIVERHEAD BOOKS, HC, 409 PP., $32.50