Last night I finished Juliet, Naked, the latest book from Nick Hornby.
Hornby is the author of High Fidelity and About A Boy, both books that were adapted for movies. I read both books before their counterpart movies and while there were significant changes from novel to screen, the movies didn't diminish the novels. Hornby also wrote Fever Pitch, which while enjoyable as a book didn't translate well to screen.
The last book I tried to read from Hornby was A Long Way Down, a wandering book about commiting suicide by jumping off roofs. I didn't make it that far before I gave up. There was a missing spark to the story. None of the characters were very likable or relatable. Because of this I was a little apprehensive of Juliet, Naked.
Some spoilers follow...
Juliet, Naked started off interesting, but it lost me toward the halfway point. In the book, "Juliet" was the last album of a 1980s musical solo artist named Tucker Crowe. Crowe mysteriously disappeared after the album, never to record another album. In pDuncan, a music aficionado and big fan of the album, creates a website to discuss Crowe and interpret the lyrics from his albums. Duncan has spent the last 20 years obsessed with Crowe. His girlfriend of 15 years, Annie, goes along with the obsession, but at the same time is starting to wonder if she is the third person in the relationship. They are both in their 40s, unmarried, childless.
All of the conflict in the story starts to occur when Duncan gets an advanced copy of Crowe's demos of acoustic versions of Juliet, which is to be released as the album "Juliet, Naked". Duncan publishes to his website a review of the new album and Annie has the opposite view. Both reviews of the album get published on Duncan's website. Because of the reviews, Duncan and Annie both start to analyze their long relationship with each other.
About halfway through the book, you start to discover what happened to Tucker and as expected the reality of his disappearance is nowhere near what theories came about on Duncan's website. Tucker's thread starts to weave with Annie's thread, but by the end there is no clear resolution to almost anything.
Overall for a Nick Hornby book I am a little disappointed. Fever Pitch, About A Boy, and High Fidelity were interesting, relatable, funny, and timely. I can't say the same for this book. It was funny in parts and interesting in the beginning, but it really went south after the midpoint.
I give it 2 out of 4 stars.