Juliet, naked
author, a quintessential Nick Hornby tale of music, superfandom, and the truths and lies we tell ourselves about life and love. Annie loves Duncan—or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn't. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life. In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they've got. Tucker's been languishing (and he's unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin—his young son, Jackson. But then there's also the new material he's about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet—entitled, Juliet, Naked. What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one's promise.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2010–2018years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you're a self-consciously hip music snob like me, two works of fiction you will enjoy are:
Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
- The purpose of this metric is to give authors a practical tool they can use to measure the degree of direct sensory language they use in their writing, and compare it with authors they admire. It's not a value judgement.
There are other admirable qualities of writing (emotional, conceptual, etc) that are orthogonal to "vividness", and in the long-run, I plan on developing metrics for those qualities as well.
For example, take a look at the works of Jane Austen. Here's the analysis of "Pride and Prejudice":
http://prosecraft.io/library/jane-austen/pride-and-prejudice...
She's a brilliant writer, and her prose is highly emotional, but it isn't especially vivid, according to my definition of "vividness", which is: prose that evokes a sensory experience (with colors, textures, flavors, aromas, sounds, and bodily sensations).
There are plenty of ways to write a brilliant novel, and some of them involve vivid sensory writing. But Jane Austen's brilliance comes from her handling of emotional relationships.
For a modern example of the same phenomenon, take a look at one of my favorite authors, Nick Hornby:
http://prosecraft.io/library/nick-hornby/about-a-boy/
http://prosecraft.io/library/nick-hornby/juliet-naked/
I've read every one of his novels, and they're all about human relationships, but the prose itself isn't very vivid. Nothing wrong with that, though. It's just a measurement.
As an author, it's helpful to be mindful of these kinds of measurements. The same thing is true of "passive voice". Using a lot of passive voice is still a legitimate way of writing, but it's helpful for an author to be aware of the literary voice they're crafting:
https://blog.shaxpir.com/thoughts-on-passive-voice-705fa4dbd...
- Contrast Nick Hornby, who in his recent book Juliet, Naked actually includes a fictitious Wikipedia entry about one of the main characters.
