Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby

Like a lot of readers, my impression of Nick Hornby is most influenced by High Fidelity, which is still widely considered his best novel. I can’t say for certain, but I suspect that the book’s popularity has not a little to do with its treatment of minutiae: the plot itself is somewhat tepid romantic comedy fare, but the tangents about pop records are delivered with such a characteristic force that one can’t help but pay attention.

Juliet, Naked attempts to recapture some of that juju. It’s the story of Tucker Crowe, a somewhat obscure indie musician from the 70s and 80s who very suddenly left the music scene (and any sort of public persona) after a mysterious incident in the bathroom of a Minnesota nightclub. For the next twenty years, a gaggle of his most devoted fans have speculated about his life, the cause of his exit, the merits of his music, and theories about his current whereabouts. To readers somewhat familiar with the indie rock scene, that kind of underground obsession is a familiar phenomenon—the tendency of the fanatical is to impose genius upon the mysterious. Hornby’s status as a cognoscente of the pop music scene gives the story a certain sense of slick verisimilitude that works well.

I said that Juliet, Naked is the story of Tucker Crowe, but it’s as much the story of Annie and Duncan, two middle-aged Brits in a loveless relationship in a small seaside town outside of London filled mostly with geriatrics. Duncan is one of those obsessive fans that I alluded to earlier; his 20-year obsession with Crowe, both pre- and especially post-disappearance is a source of eye-rolling dismissal from Annie, who is mostly with Duncan out of sheer laziness or inertia. She wants a child; Duncan doesn’t, and at 45, Annie is feeling her latitude slipping away.

Things begin to fall apart (or come together….. [said with a rising inflection]) when Duncan receives in the mail a new album called Juliet, Naked, a collection of rough acoustic demos of the songs from Crowe’s final album, Juliet. While Annie is underwhelmed by the new album (she is, while not a Tucker Crowe enthusiast, could be considered a Tucker Crowe fan), Duncan finds it brilliant, and their differing opinions (not to mention Duncan’s subtely dismissive rejection of hers) shine a light on the hairline cracks in their relationship. When Annie—heretofore largely unengaged in writing—writes a review and posts it to the Tucker Crowe website which Duncan frequents, it elicits a clandestine email from none other than Tucker Crowe himself.

I have to admit that I find the character drama of Juliet, Naked a little less engaging than that of High Fidelity, but that’s perhaps because I have more in common with a relatively young music store owner than I do with a 45-year-old doofus from Britain But while the two books are compared, and quite rightly, their narrative characters are actually substantially different: they are both, at heart, about a couple or couples struggling to find themselves, but while his earlier novel’s characters were indefatigably hip despite themselves, the characters of Juliet, Naked are all irreparably broken, sagging creatures, fighting against the physical and psychological ravages of age and their own, considerably less hip, dysfunction.

Like most romances of this sort, the relationships which eventually form or disband are predictable, though this has never stopped such stories from being popular or interesting. The meaning and impact tends to filter through preconceptions of the readers; as High Fidelity was to vinyl lovers and post-collegiate sad sacks in the throes of existential crises, so Juliet, Naked is to depressive middle-agers and pathetic indie scene kids and obstinate men clinging to their youthful obsessions. You could call the ending “happy” if you don’t mind vilifying (perhaps unnecessarily) a number of its characters, and you don’t mind seeing it coming from quarter of the way into the book. Hornby’s writing so heavily telegraphs itself that it obviates the actual reading of the book; the narrative progression is a function of nothing more than time–it seems as though it will labor to its conclusion regardless of our emotional investment or the growth of its characters or events of any particular interest. I begin to wonder if the book requires no more to read than it apparently took Hornby to write it. I see what he was trying to do, but I can’t escape the suspicious that he phoned this one in.

1. Coheed & Cambria – [Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV #13] The Willing Well II – From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness
2. Matchbox Twenty – [Yourself or Someone Like You #05] Girl Like That
3. Dream Theater – [When Dream And Day Unite #04] The Killing Hand
4. The Samuel Jackson Five – [Easily Misunderstood #07] No Name
5. Opeth – [Orchid #08] Into The Frost Of Winter
6. Nightingale – [The Breathing Shadow #02] Sleep…
7. Havergal Brian – [Symphony No. 1 "Gothic" CD2 #07] VI. Te ergo quaesumus
8. Queens of the Stone Age – [Era Vulgaris #04] Into The Hollow
9. Borknagar – [Quintessence #02] The Presence Is Ominous
10. Black Ox Orkestar – [Nisht Azoy #05] Ratsekr Grec

Interesting sidenote: Matchbox 20′s Yourself or Someone Like You was my favorite album from about 1996 until 2000; even then, it remained among my top ten rock/pop albums of all time (still does—and to my unending consternation, no Matchbox 20 album since then has come anywhere close to replicating the phenomenon).

1. Andrew Bird – [Weather Systems #02] I
2. Farmakon – [A Warm Glimpse #05] Same
3. The Polyphonic Spree – [The Fragile Army #06] Section 26 [We Crawl]
4. Souvenir’s Young America – [An Ocean Without Water #03] Dark Was the Night Cold Was the Ground
5. Tool – [Undertow #09] Flood
6. The Smashing Pumpkins – [Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness CD1 #12] Muzzle
7. Spiritual Beggars – [Ad Astra #12] Mantra
8. Sergei Rachmaninov – [24 Preludes, Sonata No. 2 CD1 #07] Prelude, op.23 no.6 in E flat major
9. Ours – [Distorted Lullabies #01] Fallen Souls
10. Oasis – [(What's the Story) Morning Glory? #05] Hey Now!

1. Radiation 4 – [Wonderland #06] John vs. The Elephant
2. Stars – [Do You Trust Your Friends? #11] He Lied About Death (Metric)
3. VAST – [Visual Audio Sensory Theater #11] Untitled
4. Ulver – [Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven & Hell CD1 #10] A Memorable Fancy, Plates 12-13
5. Té – [It Be The Thinking As 'the Song' Of Realistic Sound From The World Which Resounds #10] Human Being Is Doing The Ability That Destroys Self Oneself By Reason ‘有’
6. Ben Folds – [Ben Folds Live #08] Fred Jones Part 2
7. Atheist – [Piece Of Time #07] Why Brother?
8. Grails – [Doomsdayer's Holiday #01] Doomsdayer’s Holiday
9. Nine Inch Nails – [Purest Feeling #09] Down In It
10. Tori Amos – [Scarlet's Walk #05] Carbon

1. Forcefeed – [Soil #01] Soil
2. Aereogramme – [My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go #01] Conscious Life For Coma Boy
3. VAST – [Nude #03] Don’t Take Your Love Away
4. Frédéric Chopin – [Complete Collection [disc 13 of 17] #02] Sonata No.1 Op.4 in C minor – II. Menuetto – Allegretto
5. Arcturus – [Aspera Hiems Symfonia, Constellation, My Angel CD1 #02] Wintry Grey
6. Estradasphere – [Palace of Mirrors #04] The Terrible Beautypower Of Meow
7. Virgin Black – [Requiem - Mezzo Forte #04] …and I am Suffering
8. Insomnium – [In the Halls of Awaiting #03] Medeia
9. World’s End Girlfriend – [Hurtbreak Wonderland #04] Grass Ark
10. Efterklang – [Tripper #03] Step Aside

1. Missy Higgins – [On A Clear Night #09] Peachy
2. Mogwai – [Come on Die Young #02] Cody
3. Opeth – [My Arms, Your Hearse #02] April Ethereal
4. Joaquin Rodrigo – [Concierto de Aranjuez (Romero) #10] Invocation et danse: 2. Allegro moderato: Polo
5. Nightingale – [I #02] Still In The Dark
6. Foo Fighters – [There Is Nothing Left To Lose #09] Headwires
7. Swarm Of The Lotus – [When White Becomes Black #09] Episode Infinity
8. Jason Falkner – [Presents Author Unknown #05] She Goes To Bed
9. Michael Jackson – [Bad #04] Liberian Girl
10. Gustav Mahler – [The Complete Symphonies CD9 #01] Symphony No.7 in E Minor – 1a. Langsam (Adagio)

1. Nine Inch Nails – [The Downward Spiral #04] March of the Pigs
2. Nine Inch Nails – [With Teeth [5.1] #12] Beside You In Time
3. Virgos Merlot – [Signs of a Vacant Soul #12] Disregarding
4. Beirut – [The Flying Club Cup #02] Nantes
5. Sergio – [Swords #02] The Spendthrift
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – [Nocturama #03] Right Out Of Your Hand
7. John Vanderslice – [Pixel Revolt #09] Dear Sarah Shu
8. Mogwai – [Happy Songs for Happy People #02] Moses? I Amn’t
9. Mew – [And The Glass Handed Kites #05] Apocalypso
10. Grails – [Doomsdayer's Holiday #01] Doomsdayer’s Holiday

1. Zao – [Legendary #04] Suspend Suspension
2. Pain of Salvation – [Entropia #12] Plains Of Dawn
3. Cave In – [Perfect Pitch Black #09] Tension In The Ranks
4. Paul Hindemith – [The 3 Piano Sonatas #03] Sonata No.1 III.Lebhaft
5. Ben Folds – [Ben Folds Live #11] Army
6. Leaves – [The Angela Test #04] As We Walk
7. Feist – [Let It Die #09] Secret Heart
8. Five Pointe O – [Untitled #05] Freedom?
9. Nine Inch Nails – [The Fragile CD1 #11] La Mer
10. Enslaved – [Below The Lights #04] Queen Of Night

1. The Dillinger Escape Plan – [Ire Works #13] Mouth Of Ghosts
2. Sentenced – [Frozen #03] Dead Leaves
3. Nick Drake – [Five Leaves Left #06] Cello Song
4. Giants – [Demo #02] Berlin Rooftop
5. Tenhi – [Kauan #02] Huomen
6. Sergei Rachmaninov (Vladimir Ashkenazy; André Previn, London Symphony Orchestra) – [Complete Piano Concertos, Rhapsody CD1 #05] Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, Op.18: 2. Adagio sostenuto
7. Conor Oberst – [Conor Oberst #01] Cape Canaveral
8. The Tea Party – [TRIPtych #12] Gone
9. Metallica – [S&M CD2 #08] One
10. The Decemberists – [The Tain #01] The Tain

1. Sondre Lerche – [Don't Be Shallow #03] I Know I Know
2. Paco de Lucía – [Antología CD1 #01] Almoraima
3. Fiona Apple – [Extraordinary Machine (Brion version, unmastered) #05] Oh Well
4. Paragon of Beauty – [Comfort Me, Infinity #01] This Impossible Moment
5. Cave In – [Jupiter #06] Requiem
6. Ben Folds – [Songs for Goldfish #05] Weather Channel Music
7. Mogwai – [Rock Action #01] Sine Wave
8. Sigur Rós – [( ) #02] Fyrsta
9. Fastball – [All the Pain Money Can Buy #08] G.O.D. (Good Old Days)
10. Darkane – [Rusted Angel #06] A Wisdoms Breed