Book Review

Since my days in seminary, Nick Hornby has been one of favorite writers. A seminary roomate introduced me to Hornby first through Fever Pitch. From there I read High Fidelity and everything Hornby writes. What drew initially drew me to Hornby was the why he used music, sports, and pop culture to convey deep truths about the people in his stories.

With his book Juliet, Naked Hornby has returned to that formula and it works rather well. The story is about the devotion that many men have to an obscure pop culture figure and how that devotion affects their relationships. In a change in style for Hornby, he tells story not just from the perspective of the obsessive fan but also the pop "icon" and the love interest.

The obsessive fan resonated with me because I know many men like him who obsessively study every detail of the music and life of their favorite musician(Jeff Buckley and Glen Phillips were some of the more common targets of in-depth fandom). However the two characters that I like the most were the musician and the story's love interest. I though both of them were far more interesting and developed then the fan.

I'm not sure if it is the result of growing and maturing but Hornby's books increasingly deal with ambiguity and frustration. Due to this development, Hornby's book ends not with a happy ending but with a more ambigious one and in the end a more hopeful one.