Nick Hornby’s current novel Juliet, Naked is the story of one Tucker Crow, an American singer-songwriter a la Jackson Browne, who retires in the middle of a tour to promote his Grammy nominated album Juliet.
Fast forward thirty years and in an English seaside town, Gooleness, which has seen nothing but better days, Crow fanatic Duncan runs an obsessive website devoted to Tucker and his long sufferring significant other Annie suffer through a fifteen year loveless, sexless, childless relationship.
And then an acoustic version of Crow’s hit album, Juliet, Naked is released.
In other words fiction writing 101: thesis, antithesis -just waiting on synthesis and new thesis a coupla hundred pages on.
So what’s the problem? Crow is living in plain sight and nobody can find him. How can they miss him?
This is one those plots where a single phone call would solve all the problems. Duncun, who vacationed in the US to visit places of Tucker interest, doesn’t think to dial 411 and ask for Crow’s number? Crow’s huge extended family of ex-wives and kids and half kids and not one thinks to sell Crow’s story to the tabs. The rockcrits who are still raving about Young Marble Giant wouldn’t bother tracking crow down? It beggars the imagination. It isn’t possible. this is 2009 -you can’t hide if you want to and Crow isn’t even trying how does the media not know where he is?
Here’s two answers. First: the McGuffin, the term dubbed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1939, is in play. Here is Wikepedia’s definition of a McGuffin: “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction.” Sometimes, the specific nature of the MacGuffin is not important to the plot such that anything that serves as a motivation serves its purpose. The MacGuffin can sometimes be ambiguous, completely undefined, generic or left open to interpretation.”
The Tucker Crow mystery is irrelevant: it’s a plot mechanism.
The second answer is one I invented when trying to explain to a friend why she shouldn’t worry too much about the backstory of a sci-fi short story I had written called “Venus Island”. “Venus Island” was about an Island (Manhattan actually, though I don’t say so) in which women rule men and are at war with inteligent wolves in a battle for control of the island. My friend wanted to know how such a future was possible. I said it didn’t matter how it was possible as long as I remained true to the premise throughout the story. It doesn’t matter Tucker Crow can’t have been invisible as long as Hornby retains the fiction.
Alright then. Juliet, Naked still sucks bad.
The synthesis is Tucker responds to Annie’s review of Juliet, Naked and if you can’t guess where this claptrap is going let me draw you a diagram (or is that blueprint?).
I like Hornby quite a lot. I thought his screenplay earlier this year to An Education was tone perfect and I’ve read two prior novels by him, High Fidelity and About A Boy and liked them both. But he is a stylistic drag who can’t describe anything and he lives and dies by his plot and this dreary mess of a plot is going nowhere.
Hornbyis also a terrible music critic with a limited vocab and reaches the absolute bottom of his career as far as I can tell, in his writing about the fictional albums. They are as bad as Jonathen Lethem’s. They are unreadable dribble.
Worst, Hornby doesn’t come close to expressing the joy of meeting someone you admire. The entire scene where Duncun and Crow meet is embarressing to read -I cringed through it like I cringed through a lot of this stuff. The best moment, indeed a great redeemer of the novel, occurs in a Northern Soul Club decades past its prime and I would love to read an entire Hornby novel located there.
Well, this aint that. Juliet, Naked is the literary equivalent of Gooleness: a wet, cloudy, stupifying bore.