Another pleasant read by Nick Hornby and if it sounds like I'm damning him with faint praise then I guess I am. His sharpest, funniest book continues to be High Fidelity. Since then his books have been comfortable but not too memorable. It's too bad because this one started great. The premise is that the heroine is involved with a man who is obsessive about a reclusive, retired singer-songwriter modeled after Dylan. Through a series of complications, the woman winds up in a relationship with the singer. Hornby has a lot of funny things to say about music-obsessives, especially the way that their expertise makes them lousy critics, but I kept expecting this book to get better and it never really did. The characters are all a little too sweet and some of it didn't ring true. Not terrible but I prefer Hornby's excellent screenplay for An Education, a film that came out this year.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (2009)
Another pleasant read by Nick Hornby and if it sounds like I'm damning him with faint praise then I guess I am. His sharpest, funniest book continues to be High Fidelity. Since then his books have been comfortable but not too memorable. It's too bad because this one started great. The premise is that the heroine is involved with a man who is obsessive about a reclusive, retired singer-songwriter modeled after Dylan. Through a series of complications, the woman winds up in a relationship with the singer. Hornby has a lot of funny things to say about music-obsessives, especially the way that their expertise makes them lousy critics, but I kept expecting this book to get better and it never really did. The characters are all a little too sweet and some of it didn't ring true. Not terrible but I prefer Hornby's excellent screenplay for An Education, a film that came out this year.
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