Nick Hornby admits mixtape murder
On the High Fidelity book tour. Via TMN, he admits as much in an essay for the Guardian about MP3 blogs that also promotes his new book.
At signings, people gave me lovingly made compilation tapes, occasionally demo tapes of their bands, or their friends' bands, and sometimes bootleg tapes of shows by artists they thought I'd like. Towards the end of the tour I no longer had room for it all, and I had to leave little piles of cassette boxes next to the waste-bins in my hotel rooms. (I couldn't bear to put them in the bins. I wasn't throwing them away; I was leaving them behind. There was a difference.)
The new book is on how we live music now. Your "we" may determine your reactions. "Juliet, Naked is in part about how a middle-aged man devotes a large chunk of his life to keeping alive the work of a long-forgotten 80s singer-songwriter; he runs a messageboard, posts essays online, and virtually lives in a virtual world, talking to people he wouldn't ever have met 10 years ago," Hornby writes. If you are Sasha Frere-Jones, or many other people, you do not share Hornby's "we."
I'm going to have to read the book eventually — paperback, probably — to find out if I do or not. The Independent gives the plot quickly:
Announcing its bathetic register from the off, Nick Hornby's sixth novel opens in the men's toilet of an unremarkable music venue in Minneapolis. Annie and Duncan, an unmarried couple with an unevenly shared passion for the music of the American singer- songwriter Tucker Crowe, have made a pilgrimage there from Gooleness, the northern English seaside town in which they live, because it is the site of the mysterious event in June 1986 which, part-way through his tour in support of the classic break-up album Juliet, marked the beginning of Crowe's ongoing period of reclusiveness. Duncan is an academic but considers "Crowology" his life's real work, and runs Can Anybody Hear Me?, a website forum named after an obscure EP, dedicated to the obsessive search for hidden meaning in Crowe's life and music. Annie, who used to be a teacher but now runs the Gooleness museum, enjoys Crowe's music, but has had to tolerate Duncan's passion as one might a mistress. Fifteen years into their stagnant and childless relationship, however, she is tiring of the arrangement.
Making up a credible fictional cultural figure, even an obscure and reclusive one such as Crowe, isn't easy, but Hornby has fun inventing and weaving into his story song titles, Wikipedia entries, snatches of lyrics and biographical mythology, until you catch yourself thinking that you ought to track down a copy of Juliet for yourself and hear what all the fuss is about. So it comes as almost as much of a surprise to the reader as it does to Annie when Crowe emails her and, unbeknown to her partner, they begin a correspondence which will cause all three of them to reassess and resist the stasis of their lives.
Early reviews are mixed on whether the book is Hornby's best since High Fidelity or not. A writer in The (London) Observer makes a criticism that, in that vein, having read the intermediate books, sounds fair:
"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."
To that end, I'd like apologize for using Hornby to dismiss Facebook.
