Nick Hornby is Exhibit A in defense of the crusty old adage “write what you know.” He built his reputation on a pair of books that traded on his twin obsessions – football (the autobiographical Fever Pitch) and pop music (his debut novel High Fidelity) – while exploring the impacts of such fixations on interpersonal relationships. His next novel, the brilliant About a Boy (1998), didn’t explore fandom directly, though one of its main characters was a former pop singer who used the residual income from his one big hit to keep the world at bay.
Since then, Hornby has broadened his thematic horizons to encompass religious fervor (How To Be Good), suicide and therapy (A Long Way Down), and teen pregnancy (the “young adult” novel Slam) – all, unfortunately, with returns considerably diminished from his earlier work. In fact, his most essential work of the last decade was a nonfiction immersion into his music fandom: the essay collection Songbook (titled 31 Songs outside the U.S.), which explores his emotional attachments to tunes by artists ranging from O.V. Wright to Royksopp. Any Popdose loyalist who has not already picked up a copy of Songbook should do so immediately.
With all that in mind, it was welcome news indeed when Penguin’s Riverhead Books subsidiary announced that Hornby’s new novel would return him to the world of those who create and devour popular music. Indeed, the setup of Juliet, Naked is almost impossibly juicy … at least from the perspective of a 21st-century music writer like me (and many of you). If you read the excerpt we posted here last week, you already know that Duncan is an obsessive fan of singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who walked away from his middling career under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago and has since become the subject of endless conjecture about his past and present lives. As leader of the “Crowologists,” and administrator of a website devoted to picking apart every detail of the singer’s career, Duncan receives a preview copy of a new CD featuring “naked” demos from Crowe’s most acclaimed (and final) album, Juliet. (more…)
