On the download

From where I'm sitting, Nick Hornby would seem to epitomize literary success. Where I'm sitting is in a chair in a posh downtown Toronto hotel room, interviewing the guy who wrote the lad-lit classics Fever Pitch (1992), High Fidelity (1995) and About a Boy (1998). Look at his output since the 1990s, and Hornby appears to be a model of productivity. But he isn't quite so sure.

When I ask him why the middle-aged characters in his new novel, Juliet, Naked, are so haunted by the significant chunks of time they've wasted, the British writer gives a surprisingly personal response.

"It's something I see in myself. It's weird. I moved [to a different] publisher in 2000, and since then, they've published four of my novels and two works of non-fiction, as well as a book of stories I edited."

He does the math for me. "So, seven books in nine years, and I have no recollection of writing any of them. All I remember is hours and hours of messing about, playing computer games, bitterly regretting how I've spent my day. And I think it must go to show that one's natural inclination is toward regret rather than celebration."

OK, so the man can be hard on himself. But he's laughing when he says this, so maybe he's half-joking. The fact is, compared to his slacker characters, Hornby has been especially prolific over the past couple of years indeed, there's much to celebrate.

Hornby was recently in Toronto to promote the book and attend afilm festivalscreening of An Education, a bittersweet period piece set in the bland, pre-Swinging London of 1962. Hornby wrote the screenplay, based on a short personal essay by British journalist Lynn Barber, and the subsequent film has wowed festival audiences at Sundance, Berlin and Toronto. Although Hornby would never admit it, the evidence is clear at 52, the author is experiencing something of a mid-career peak.

His latest novel, Juliet, Naked, is both hilarious and touching, another beautifully observed, wry Hornby take on smart underachievers having trouble with adult responsibilities like monogamous relationships and parenthood. Annie and Duncan live in a drab English coastal town called Gooleness (love the dreary, lifeless name). She works in a museum with attractions that reveal the lack of compelling local history while he teaches pop culture courses at a third-rate college. They've been together for 15 years, and Annie is eager to have a child while she still can. The pompous Duncan, on the other hand, spends most of his waking hours obsessed with Tucker Crowe, a long-lost rocker (along the lines of Dylan or Springsteen) who disappeared in 1986 after a legendary Minneapolis gig. Annie grudgingly accepts his fandom, referring to it as "part of the package, like a disability."

Crowe's masterwork was an intense break-up album called Juliet; he hasn't released anything new for years. So when Duncan is sent an advance copy of a stripped-down, demo-heavy reissue of the album called Juliet, Naked, he falls in love with it. In an editorial for Crowe's online fan community, Duncan declares the new product superior to the original. Annie thinks her partner's opinions are rubbish and posts a counter-editorial, claiming the original version is the one to cherish. Juliet, Naked, she opines, is just Juliet "without all the good bits." The rocker now living in obscurity in Pennsylvania reads her article andenters her life in a most surprising way.

Like High Fidelity, Juliet, Naked is funny and insightful about the world of music obsessives. The story begins with Duncan dragging Annie to Minneapolis to look at a toilet in the club where Crowe's career imploded.

"I couldn't imagine when I finished High Fidelity that I would want to write another book about music consumption," says Hornby. "But the world has changed so radically. Everything's different because of the internet. It just seemed to me there was a lot of fresh territory to talk about. This is really an amazing time to be a music fan, where everything you've ever wanted to hear is in a box on your desk, effectively."

Juliet, Naked is unimaginable without the internet. Wikipedia entries on Crowe's career, email exchanges and message board discussions are part of the narrative mix. It all flows quite seamlessly, but Hornby also acknowledges the echo chamber effect of the web.

"Now, of course, you can spend an awful lot of time talking to people who feel exactly the same way as you about exactly the same artist. What's interesting about that is that one, as a consequence, doesn't have to spend very much time talking to people who do not share your enthusiasms. So, you can dig deeper into your own sense of isolation while at the same time sharing it with others. If you only ever listen to the thing that you love and talk about the thing that you love there's a danger of you getting lost inside yourself a bit."

Juliet, Naked is more than just High Fidelity with a high-speed connection. It contains some fascinating meditations on authenticity, how people consume art, what it means to be a good parent and those aforementionedmiddle-age pangs about lost years decades, even. As always with Hornby, the complexities are presented in highly accessible prose there's no arcane language or stylistic gymnastics. He'll probably never win the Man Booker Prize, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for him.

"Books are really, really important to me. I think they should be really important to everybody. And I am concerned that a lot of writers are talking to themselves and to each other, that they allow books to become marginalized. People want to read, whatever it might be: Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code. There is this appetite for books that absorb [readers], and a lot of literary writers are not providing that.

"I think we've got to find a way, as a literary community, of taking on the lessons of HBO. The Wire is kind of a complicated program, and The Sopranos is a fairly uncompromising program, but people really wanted to watch it. And the kind of snooty dismissal of narrative and the hunger to know what happens next that really troubles me about a strain of contemporary literature."

Hornby lives by his own credo. Juliet, Naked is just as engaging as his other novels, the deftly sketched characters just as true to life. And who else could come up with a line as pithy as this one, about Crowe's decision to leave the music business: "Stopping had been a very smart career move provided, that is, you ignored the lack of a career that was the inevitable consequence."

"I think I've probably made a cultural ideology out of a necessity," Hornby laughs. "I don't seem to be able to write anything but accessible books."

Juliet, Naked is published by Penguin and is in stores now.

An Education opens in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on Oct. 23.

Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.