“Juliet, Naked” an interesting book

The Internet can be the mother of obsession.
Its endless archives of information feed compulsive behaviors by always being there and not being there at the same time: immediately accessible yet hardly physical. It can be an inexhaustible drug kept hidden from view by a thin layer of 1's and 0's, or it can be an indispensable source for well-intentioned research.
Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked" has the storied author entering the digital era with Wikipedia entries, e-mail correspondence and the titular leaked album serving as a bedrock on which an "arranged marriage" of sorts teeters on the edge of the cliff. Hornby keeps his focus zeroed-in on music through the reclusive Tucker Crowe and his abruptly stopped career, cut short after the release of the perennial breakup album "Juliet."
The character of Duncan makes up one-half of the aforementioned "marriage" – more a matter of routinely being together – at the center of the plot. He and Annie are an English couple whom we find not having fallen out of love, but never having been in love. Although Annie aches to have a child, Duncan keeps his attention squarely on Crowe and the mostly unsubstantiated reasons behind his departure from the public eye. It's his intense, yet fragile love of Crowe that leads him to pour inordinate amounts of time into what he sees as well-intentioned research.
When an unreleased copy of Crowe's "Juliet, Naked," which is to be the artist's first album in some 15 years, finds Annie first, the crux of the novel begins to take shape. An unimportant museum curator stuck in a romantic rut, Annie jumps at the chance to think for herself before Duncan interlopes and belittles her appreciation (or denigration, in this case) of art. After Duncan does just that, Annie entertains the thought of trying a hand at writing a review, stepping on Duncan's turf: his online forum full of similarly obsessed, middle-aged men.
"She'd heard the music, even before he had, which meant that for the first time ever she'd formed an opinion about it that hadn't been filtered through his own intimidating evangelism … She wanted to see for herself just how wrongheaded he could be, how far apart they were."
As Annie gains ground in what had been a one-sided relationship, she receives encouragement from her coworker to go through with her criticism, saying, "They need someone like you. Otherwise they all disappear up their own bottoms."
From there, the story takes off. A strange love right triangle forms, with the hypotenuse barely connecting Duncan and Annie and the short sides meeting at Crowe. In other words, Crowe catches wind of Annie's review, admires her honesty and thus strikes up a conversation via miles and miles of ethernet. Still, the extensive back-and-forth that results is far from passionate: "Yes, there was some kind of connection between her and Tucker, maybe, but it was a gossamer cyberthread: blow on it and it would break."
Hornby's prose warms the cold, impersonality that pervades obsessions kept alive and well by the Internet. He's witty and concise, bringing into the mix his own immense knowledge of all things musical. Duncan's mostly unjustified logs of Tucker Crowe post-"Juliet" give way to a fully developed main character, a Tucker Crowe with wants and needs and a whole lot of baggage.
He keeps an outsider's perspective of the potential madness that is life on the Web, speaking mostly from Annie's commonsensical point of view. After publishing her review of "Juliet, Naked," she is greeted with a snide, Morrissey-referencing response, causing her to take stock of what's really going on.
"She wondered why someone would bother to write that; but then, ‘Why bother' was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the Internet, otherwise the whole bunch of them shriveled to a cotton-candy nothing."
All in all, "Juliet, Naked," the novel, is a much-needed commentary on the evils of being entrenched in music and its representation online. Hornby is a joy to read, never falling to the snobbery of Duncan, never unnecessarily telling us all about what he knows. It's a fine line between writing a novel about an obsession and being consumed by it, and Hornby knows just where to stand: with one foot in the door and one foot out.