Book review: Juliet, Naked, by Nick Hornby
January 13th, 2010 by IonaThis is a better book than A Long Way Down. Admittedly, every book ever published is probably better than A Long Way Down. This is quite a good book.
To put it another way – well, I have read all of Hornby’s novels save Slam, which suggests I’m a fan, doesn’t it? I read the first three in a breathless teenage rush, thinking grand thoughts about transformative and meaningful and zeitgeist, and then I read How To Be Good much much later, and changed my mind with almost the same rapidity. Hornby writes well, but I rather think he thinks too much of himself, tries too hard to be both funny and profound, and it comes across as forced, particularly the grand-hollowness-at-the-centre-of-middle-class-existence schtick. His characters certainly do suffer from that sort of hollowness, but that’s because they’re characters in a Hornby novel and not real people. Nowhere does this manifest more than in A Long Way Down, which has a wonderful idea at its heart, and an excellent first few chapters, and then quickly becomes a plotless, heartless mess.
So I wasn’t surprised to pick up Juliet, Naked and find myself thoroughly enjoying the first couple of chapters, but I was more surprised when I carried on enjoying it after that. The plot centres around Annie, a middle-aged woman living in a northern seaside town, and her live-in boyfriend of fifteen years, Duncan the feckless nerd. Duncan has been obsessed for a decade with one obscure, reclusive singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe; when he releases a new album and it’s not that good, Annie suddenly realises she wants out. Having wasted fifteen years of your life, though, is not something you can throw off in a hurry; somewhere in the American Midwest, Tucker is thinking the same thing.
And that’s…. it, really. Hornby isn’t good at plots, but here he works that to a positive advantage, taking his time over the very simple progression of events, and taking pleasure in getting you to like Annie and loathe Duncan a little bit. (He’s a little bit of a caricature, but not much of one; I certainly admit to having met this particular kind of obsessive, strident, hiding-in-internet fan.) And Tucker, too, is drawn well, likeable even if his interior monologue does seem to contain a lot of faux-profundity, and all the supporting cast have their time in the sun, too.
In the end, it’s a little bit of a fairytale. I suspect it’s not supposed to be one. I suspect it’s meant to be a savage attack on middle-aged loneliness and the evils of the internet, or else a maundering on the ways in which people waste their lives. It’s meant to be depressing. But, you know, it’s not the nineties any more, and this is a nice little book about some people falling in love.
