More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby

I've been a devoted fan of Nick Hornby's work for quite a long time.  I remember opening a new bookstore and a friend lending me an early finished copy of High Fidelity and was immediately taken with his prose and his characters.  I knew Rob and Barry and Dick.  They were me and my friends and the dudes from the record store where I shopped and the bookstore where I worked. I, too, made passive/aggressive, not-nearly-so-subtle-as-I-thought-I-was mix tapes for girls I liked.  Hornby nailed it and lad lit was born!  (Cue sunbeams and trumpet fanfare and dropping testicles.) This begat About A Boy, as touching a novel as I'd read and still one of my faves.

Fortunately, Hornby had too much talent to stay too long in the lad lit ghetto and he produced How To Be Good and A Long Way Down and the lovely Juliet, Naked, as well as forays into non-fiction and YA books and screenplays.  Oddly, I didn't follow him into magazine writing because I thought the mag for which he writes, The Believer, all too hipper-than-thou for a dork like me.  With More Baths, Less Talking, I may have to change my thinking.

Sub-titled Notes From the Reading Life of a Celebrated Author Locked in Battle With Football, Family and Time Itself, Hornby does what I do with this blog: he writes about what he reads, with plenty of digressions about wife and kids, his outside interests, and his fame, along with gibes and japes at Believer editors and subscribers and a ton of hilarious self-deprecating remarks, albeit far more successfully and entertainingly than do I because he's a celebrated and talented author and I, well, I'm neither celebrated nor particularly talented nor am I an author but more of a lazy schlub with a badly-maintained blog and far too much unqualified opinion.  Go Steelers!  Hurray for Mrs. Next!

That said, Hornby is witty and insightful, his asides are clever and biting, and his reading choices are inspired.  A slim volume at a mere 135 pages, More Baths, Less Talking provided me with lots to consider, plenty to laugh about, and a desire to make this very blog as entertaining as his magazine pieces.  If only I can find the time and acquire the talent.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

I was but a young bookseller when I was given a copy of High Fidelity and was sold immediately on the author's talents.  There have been some peaks and valleys since but I am happy to say Juliet, Naked is my favorite Hornby book since About a Boy. 

Hornby has always been adept at, and has become expert in, portraying his characters with depth despite their shallowness, honesty despite their self-deceit and the ability to change after hitting bottom.  He has a way of imbuing his characters with a marvelous sense of humanity while also keeping them normal and real and even mundane.  I believe it is this sense of the mundane that makes them so readily identifiable.  Not only do I know Rob from High Fidelity or About a Boy's Will, I am Rob, I have been Will and, in this instance, Duncan and Tucker AND Annie.  (here's a question I've always had: does Hornby write women well?  After all these years, I still can't decide.)

So, to Juliet:  in short, Duncan, a university teacher, worships an obscure American singer/songwriter named Tucker Crowe, whose retirement from music is shrouded in rumor and innuendo, much of it fueled and speculated on by Duncan and his like-minded Internet cohorts.  Duncan and girlfriend Annie long ago lost sight of each other and muddle through life as DuncanandAnnie, a sort of loveless blob, together more by habit than affection.  When Annie strikes up an unusual email correspondence with the reclusive Crowe, everything comes unglued though it doesn't become the sitcom it could in less capable hands.  Fortunately for the reader, Hornby tells a story that is entertaining and emotionally honest and is filled with warmth, growth and humor.