Juliet, Naked

I had a post interview followup (which reminds me, I need to send a thank you card) call with one of the members of the interview panel in which I let slip that "honestly, I read more children and teen fiction than adult fiction."

"Yes, that seems to be the trend."

My response, "The quality of adult writing just isn't any good."

It's hard to say a statement like that because it dismisses all adult fiction in one lump. Perhaps it is better to say, "popular fiction," but even then, I enjoyed the clear, direct writing of Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (up until the point she describes the vampires getting aroused at the sight of one of their kind getting killed and the main character's lover-vamp "plows her into the ground"), although I won't be reading any of the remaining books in the series, because a look through the synopsis shows it is more or less the same plot over and over again and how can a character who professes to love another character within days or weeks of meeting then go on to become the lover of a nemesis or some other fellow, while completely ignoring the guy next door who may very well be pining for her through eleven books?

Anyway, the point of this is to say that I read Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked, which I was putting off because I didn't want to read a book by the author of High Fidelity, which I didn't read either, but saw the movie and saw that the movie was literary in ways at the age when I saw it I wasn't ready to appreciate. And so, Juliet, Naked is a good book to disprove my above assessment of adult fiction.

And disproves it in a better way that Ann Patchet's State of Wonder, which I wanted to like because everyone else liked it and because it was a bestseller and because I was supposed to like it, but just fell short and completely betrayed itself twice by switching once from plot to character and then in the final chapter back to plot. I was so aggravated by the Hollywood-ran-out-of-budget ending that I turned around and read the Hunger Games trilogy three times.

The Reader's Advisory says to look at the blurbs on the books for info for read alikes to see if any other authors or titles are mentioned, but the blurbs on my copy only refer to Hornby. I don't know how to describe the book better than "subtle," which is the very adjective I was searching for when I saw it on the back cover describing Hornby the writer. I laughed at the dialogue, I loved the development of the characters and their emotional evolution. And maybe that's why I prefer teen/children fiction: because so much of adult fiction, including State of Wonder, doesn't address the evolution of an adult's emotional/spiritual/personal being in that cathartic, realistic way that the book the Uses of Enchantment says is so pivotal to children's books. I guess I've been looking for books that address my evolution as an adult and found few books taking it seriously and just focusing on the sex.

Or maybe I just identified with the main character who so desperately wanted to have sex because she is a woman who wants to live, but who wanted her partner to be someone she'd be happy to wake up next to the next morning, even if he's got serious inner conflict of choosing to be an artist over being a parent. And I just didn't get that with Sookie or Dr. Marina Singh. So thanks, Nick Hornby, for writing a book that looks honestly at being an adult. I always liked your column Stuff I've Been Reading in the Believer.