 |
| Naked, and empty too |
I’ve always liked Nick Hornby as a bloke ever since reading an interview where he said that after he became famous he started getting calls from other famous people inviting him round to dinner just because he was now famous. His response to this was pretty much, What the fuck? I don’t even know you. Though presumably he wanted to avoid going to dinner parties too, which is understandable. Anyway, ‘Fever Pitch’ is obviously a classic (even though I have a major quibble with it, but that’s another blog entry altogether), and ‘High Fidelity’ and ‘How To Be Good’ were both solid novels. ‘About A Boy’ was ridiculous, and ‘A Long Way Down’ (about four suicidal characters meeting at the top of a very tall building) I quickly renamed in my head as ‘Jump, You Whiny Fuckers, Jump!’ The problem with these books is the same one that runs through ‘Juliet, Naked’ like a sopping, sand-soaked paperback after you accidentally dropped it in the surf. It’s the characters, stupid.
In ‘About A Boy’ we were asked to believe that lead character Will, living off the royalties from a song his old man composed, has spent his entire adult life doing absolutely nothing. This is not just existentially improbable, but also makes Will a dull fucker, at best. But Hornby excels at portraying such sullen, repressed individuals – reserved, emotionally inert, and obsessed with some sub-culturally related, non-mainstream object of desire (or in Will’s case, finding a woman desperate enough to have him). In ‘Juliet, Naked’ we have Duncan spending his three-week holiday in the US following the trail of reclusive singer Tucker Crowe, who inexplicably stopped recording in 1986. His girlfriend Annie tags along, even though she has misgivings about her boyfriend’s hobby. Oh, and they’ve been together for 15 years, she knows that he has no sense of humour, and she’s never actually been in love with him. If that’s really plausible, then that makes her even more feckless than dorky Duncan. Why are we interested in these people again?
When they get back home to Gooleness, a grim Yorkshire seaside resort where they’ve also been bored for the past 15 years, Duncan gets a ‘new’ CD in the mail from Tucker’s
