Juliet Naked
nice book
JULIET, NAKED
By Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby is again having fun with - making fun of - an obsessive music fan. What’s different now, 14 years after High Fidelity, is that fans live out their obsessions on the Internet, a place where distances shrink, time collapses, and it’s very easy to get lost.
Duncan, a teacher in the bedraggled English seaside town of Gooleness, has been a fan from the time “Juliet” was made, but only since the advent of the Internet has he been able to establish himself as a principal “scholar” of the album. “Until then, the nearest fellow fan had lived in Manchester, 60 or 70 miles away. . . . Now the nearest fans lived in Duncan’s laptop, and there were hundreds of them, from all around the world, and Duncan spoke to them all the time.” The Internet is a place where an album like “Juliet,” and Tucker Crowe, the American musician who made it, can live forever.
Duncan’s pseudo-intellectual, misinformed pronouncements about “Juliet” would be enough to expose him as a humorless fool.
All three characters have dark views of themselves, and Hornby relies mainly on their self-criticism to make you smirk. Tucker, finding himself corralled into a series of reunions with his estranged children, thinks he’s becoming an expert on paternal reintroduction and wonders whether he should run classes.
When, after decades of silence, Tucker allows the release of “Juliet, Naked,” a set of old solo acoustic demos of the songs on “Juliet,” Duncan rushes to be the first to praise it online.Annie, already irritated with Duncan for caring more about Tucker Crowe than her, bats back by posting an essay of her own, pointing out that “Naked” is nothing compared with the finished version. And so her breakup with Duncan begins. Meanwhile, breakups aplenty have been happening in Tucker Crowe’s life.
Along with all the breakups come new connections - e-mail connections, to begin with - between Tucker and Annie, and eventually also Duncan, along with revelations about the breakup behind “Juliet” and why Tucker dropped out in the first place. Duncan and all the other Crowologists have had it all wrong, it’s no surprise to learn. But Tucker has misunderstood some things, too, as Hornby skillfully leads you to care. “You asked us to listen,” Duncan gets a chance to tell the former artist - along with a few other choice truths about the role that fans play in making music immortal. You could find the book here.
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