Why worship them?

Lead Review

In many ways, the premise for this, Nick Hornby’s sixth novel, seems typically enticing. In a washed-up British seaside town with the fittingly dead name of Gooleness, Annie and Duncan have stewed for 15 years in a relationship that feels similarly lifeless, partly because it contains a third person.

Duncan has long been obsessed with a 1980s American singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe who, after Juliet (his 1986 “legendary break-up album”), sank mysteriously from view, never recording or appearing in public again. This has only intensified the admiration of his mainly male, fortysomething fanbase.

But even though the website that Duncan runs for fellow ‘Crowologists’ has a ‘latest news’ section, for 20-odd years there hasn’t been any. So when an advance copy of ‘Juliet, Naked’ — an about-to-be-released CD of “solo acoustic demos of all the songs on the album, plus two new unreleased songs from the same session” — comes Duncan’s way, he is transported to Crowe heaven.

Furious with Annie for listening to the album first, he rushes to post the first ecstatic review on his website. Meanwhile, Annie, whose admiration for Crowe is far more objective, sees ‘Juliet, Naked’ for what it is: “Juliet but without all the good bits.” Irritated by Duncan’s unquestioning worship — and increasingly aware that she may have wasted 15 years with this one-track man — she posts her own, less adulatory review. When she immediately gets an appreciative email back from Tucker Crowe himself, she’s not the only one who’s shocked — so are we.

I admit I was at first rather hoping that the whole point of Hornby’s novel would be that Tucker Crowe would never actually appear. Its likably bleak humour lies mostly in Hornby’s pitch-perfect examination of male fandom and the almost sinister way in which the advent of the internet has fed and enabled it. He’s every bit as good as you’d expect on the crazed dynamic of the messageboard and the way in which the web has enabled fans to stalk and even, somehow, take possession of their idols from the safety of darkened bedrooms. It’s no joke when Annie quips that Duncan knows more about Crowe than Crowe himself. And Hornby knows how such an obsession can haunt a relationship: when Annie observes that she has long accepted the Crowe thing as “part of the package, like a disability,” you know all you need to know about life with Duncan.

However, so convincing is the Tucker Crowe who inhabits Duncan’s mind that when we meet the real person pushing a trolley around a supermarket somewhere in America with his six-year-old son, it feels deflating. That is Hornby’s point — idols are only as big as the fantasies we project on to them. Still, as Crowe establishes himself as the third narrator of this tale, the writing loses its engaging fluidity.
There’s nothing very surprising about the fact that Crowe doesn’t believe in his own status or that, like Annie, he thinks he’s wasted half his life. And it ought to be interesting that, trailing as he does a string of ex-wives and neglected offspring in his wake, he also carries with him the deep, dark secret of what actually triggered that 1986 withdrawal from the world. But somehow, after that build-up, it’s not quite interesting enough.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty to admire in this novel. No one writes about music, and the emotional space it takes up, like Hornby. And every time you worry he’s about to do something really obvious, he swerves away in the nick of time. What could have been a cringingly, soppily romantic encounter between Annie and Crowe is made far more achingly real when, to her frustration, she finds herself behaving like yet another disapproving wife. And the pure deliciousness of the moment when Duncan realises his ex-girlfriend is hanging out with his idol is certainly well-earned.

Hornby has made no secret in the past of his admiration for the simplicity and soul of Anne Tyler’s work, and there’s nothing in the plot of this novel that I couldn’t imagine that writer tackling. But I found myself longing for a little of Tyler’s sly ambiguity, for her ability to leave you worrying, hoping, caring. When Hornby tells us what's going on in a character’s head, it’s not that we don’t believe him, more that it leaves us too little to do. I wanted gaps, I wanted subtext, I wanted uncertainty.
Elasticity — a sense that a novel has been written, in part at least, because its author needed to find something out for themselves — is an underrated part of what creates narrative atmosphere and tension. It’s also a large part of why we read on. Nick Hornby is an enormously accomplished writer, but next time I’d love to read less about what he’s already decided and more about what he still needs to find out.