The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it into a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he’d managed to do that with just about everybody he’d ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby came out in 2009 and takes place around the same time. Hornby, who is British, displays Tony-Blair era sensibilities in his writings. This isn’t a criticism: Those sensibilities are sensible and don’t diminish his skill as an author. Juliet, Naked is mostly about art, and it’s a fine little book. I liked the characters’ ad-hoc monologues, which serve as an excellent delivery vehicles for some profound truths.
What elevates this book, and all of the other books by Hornby that I have read About a Boy and A Long Way Down, is his engaging writing. He’s making it easy for the reader. It’s the sort of writing that’s not going to win him the Nobel prize, but that people actually read.
If this conversation were a prophet, it would be one of those scary Old Testament guys, rather than gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Mildness was clearly an elusive quality; you couldn’t just turn it on and off when you felt like it. But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature, and there was no thermostat.
Here is Hornby’s Substack, called A Fan’s Notes. Unfortunately, reading his posts requires signing up.
Nehaveigur 