"Juliet, Naked" by Nick Hornby

I came to this book with low-ish expectations. I've never read a book by Nick Hornby (though I'm pretty sure I've watched at least two movie adaptations of his work) and I guess I expected the written equivalent of a rom-com. I thought it might be more witty and less sappy than your typical Nicholas Sparks book, but would probably be comparable to something by Marc Levy. I didn't think I would hate it, but I didn't think I would be impressed by it.

It's kind of a weird feeling for a book to match my expectations. I've come to books with high expectations and ended up disappointed; I've come to books with moderate expectations and been either more impressed or more let down than I thought possible; I've come to books with low or no expectations and found them to be among my favorites. But it seems pretty unusual for me to assume a book will be a certain way, and then find out I'm right.

To be fair, this book didn't explicitly match my preconceived notions in its entirety. There were points where it rose above, but equal points where it dropped below, so on average it was just what I had assumed it would be.

Juliet, Naked is about Duncan and Annie, an almost-middle-aged couple living a boring old life in a boring old seaside town in England. The main focus of Duncan's spare time is Tucker Crowe, a once (semi-?) famous American musician who suddenly and mysteriously left the public eye in June 1986 and hadn't been heard from since. Duncan considers himself a "Crowologist" who has listened to and dissected every recorded version of every song Crowe ever sang, and who also scours the Internet for any possible scrap of information about Crowe's life. And Annie is just awakening to the fact that their childless and unchanging existence seems to have wasted the last fifteen years of her life.

The book rose slightly above my expectations about a third of the way through, as the complexities of the characters' personalities were slowly revealed (Duncan wasn't just dull, Annie wasn't just bored and lost). The book dipped into disappointing territory when Tucker showed up in London and the story seemed to founder. And the most promising premise (an English girl writes a review of an American artist and posts it online; the American artist reads the review and writes an e-mail to the English girl, sparking a correspondence) ultimately fell a bit flat, as one would have to be unbelievably lucky for something like that to work out well and have a miraculously happy ending. Overall, though, it was a fun book, if not something I would re-read.