Culture of fandom, hilariously dissected

By Nick Hornby

Riverhead Books.

404 pp. $25.95

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Reviewed by Jane Smiley

I used to know a guy who was so adept at answering rock-and-roll trivia questions and identifying songs in radio contests that DJs around New York City, where he lived, could recognize his voice when he called in. They would then hang up on him before he could answer the question and win another prize.

This is the sort of guy Nick Hornby is, and he has made a lovely career out of surveying his (sometimes bleak but often very funny) cultural landscape.

In the United Kingdom, it may be that his most famous book remains his first, Fever Pitch, about his obsession with the Arsenal football team. Here in the United States, though, we've especially enjoyed High Fidelity and About a Boy, which became entertaining films after they were entertaining novels. In his last two novels, he has contemplated what for many are more important moral dilemmas, how to be good and how not to commit suicide.

In Juliet, Naked, he returns to fandom. Hornby is thoughtful and even entertaining when considering moral dilemmas, but really, fandom is his most inspiring subject, and through that, art (but I say this last in a whisper).

Hornby's fan, an Englishman in his 40s named Duncan, is what Malcolm Gladwell would call a "maven," and his area of expertise is profoundly small: a long-vanished American singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe.

Duncan might have moved on from Tucker 15 years ago, but (fatally for his psychological development) the coming of the Internet linked him with the handful of other "Crowologists" around the world, and this group has constructed an online culture, in which Duncan considers himself the preeminent expert.

Hornby is both insightful and hilarious in dissecting this culture and indicating the ways in which it is really no different from any specialized area of knowledge - say, Thackeray studies or studies of even more obscure artists (Caedmon, anyone?).

Another of Duncan's misfortunes is that he lives with a very nice woman (and pretty, too), named Annie, who doesn't quite share his views about the merits of Tucker Crowe relative to other, lesser artists such as Bob Dylan, or his precise estimates of the relative merits of the various items of Tucker's catalogue.

As a result of this trial, Duncan allows his eye to rove, and when it settles upon a new girl in town, an agreeable young actress, he succumbs and then tells Annie about it. Annie, who has been entertaining a fresh connection of her own over the Internet, kicks Duncan out.

Annie, who works in the local museum of a small seaside town not far from Hull, on England's northeast coast (speaking of Caedmon), cannot believe how completely she has wasted her life. However, her Internet friend lives on a farm in Pennsylvania. He is Tucker Crowe.

At this point, since Nick Hornby is a comic (though bittersweet) novelist, his task is to bring Annie and Tucker together. We soon learn that Tucker's life for the last 20 has been even more aimless than Duncan's, in part because he devoted a good proportion of it to alcohol and drugs, and in part because he can't remember how to make music or why. Tucker's main daily activity is rearing his 6-year-old son, Jackson.

Just as Ernest Hemingway was a guy writer who appealed to the male culture of his day (fighting wars, shooting game, abandoning women), so Nick Hornby appeals to the male culture of our day (Internet dueling, micro-expertise, ignoring women). Hornby is funny, though, in that wry English way. His books have stylistic satirical bounce - every few pages there is a line that no one else would have thought of, such as "Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected."

I am also fond of Annie's therapist, Malcolm, an elderly, defeated man who never gives her any support whatsoever. And the town where Annie and Duncan live, Gooleness. Where could it exist other than down the road from Grimsby?

But Hornby is sadly less bold with his American scene and his American characters. Contrary to everything we Americans know, they seem blandly well-meaning and generally responsible, or, if not, at least regretful about their failings. Perhaps he should have visited Pennsylvania more often, or at least watched Jon and Kate Plus Eight on streaming video. He would have found himself a landscape and some idiosyncrasies to mock. I don't mind if my satirists are kindhearted, but the sole American who is any fun here is the one who breaks and enters, and we only see him once.

Even so, Juliet, Naked is not a book for Hornby fans to miss, and let's hope the movie features Owen Wilson as Tucker Crowe.