A thirtysomething music obsessive with a shaky grasp on relationships and a flat full of bootlegs and B-sides. A good, clever woman who is taken for granted. A charming American singer-songwriter who breaks the status quo. Does Juliet, Naked bear any resemblance to Hornby’s debut novel, High Fidelity? Yes. Is it even half as good? No.

Juliet, Naked is the less exciting cousin of High Fidelity: the one who moved out of London, settled down and started ordering DVDs through the post.

Instead of Highbury, we’re in Gooleness, a dead-end English seaside town. Instead of the record shop, there’s the local college and museum. Instead of the cut-and-paste seduction of compilation tapes, there is a detailed description of labelling track titles in iTunes. And instead of a sharp and witty deconstruction of the modern male, there is a loosely tied bundle of observations about art, relationships, parenthood and time — some perceptive or funny, others simply bland.

Duncan, a humourless college teacher, is obsessed by the cult American singersongwriter Tucker Crowe, who has been silent since his 1986 break-up album, Juliet. Duncan’s girlfriend, Annie, spends her working days amassing tatty exhibits for the museum, and her holidays trailing around after Duncan while he stalks Crowe’s old haunts. Their 15-year-old relationship is going nowhere: she is aching for a baby, whereas Duncan is “nobody’s idea of a father”.

Across the Atlantic, Crowe — who was launched in 1977 with the bombastic slogan “Bruce plus Bob plus Leonard equals Tucker” — is out of work and out of cash. He cannot account for most of the past 20 years, he thinks his best-loved work is crap and he’s struggling to keep track of his various estranged children and girlfriends.

When a collection of Crowe’s demos — entitled Juliet, Naked — is released, Duncan is moved to tears, immediately proclaiming its superiority over the finished album. Annie disagrees. They both post essays on Duncan’s fansite. Crowe comes across Anne’s critique, sends her an admiring e-mail, and they begin a secret correspondence.

Within this rather weak, directionless plot there are several vintage Hornby moments. His characters invariably communicate through culture, investing it with almost supernatural significance. When Duncan meets Gina, a drama teacher at his college, and she asks to borrow his favourite TV series, he knows it is the beginning of an affair: “They went out for a drink on the day he took series one of The Wire into work with him, hidden inside a newspaper and then placed in his satchel so that Annie wouldn’t see what he was up to.” Later, Annie wants to impress a poorly Crowe with a gift of books, but she ends up feeling paralysed by choice: she buys far too many and ends up furtively posting several paperbacks into a litter bin on the way into the hospital.

But, as the polarised reactions to Juliet, Naked prove, it’s not just what you consume, it’s how you consume it. Hornby has something of a manifesto on this, and it’s to do with taking art on its own terms — not ranking it from “low” to “high”, or valuing context over text, or liking something simply because it’s difficult or exclusive. Duncan’s passion for music has been swamped by trivia, footnotes and the oneupmanship of fandom: it takes the “untutored” ears of Annie and Gina to re-release the emotion and artistry in Juliet.

These ideas aren’t uninteresting, but their expression often feels forced and, at the same time, curiously slack and lacklustre, especially coming from characters who, though acutely observed in the Hornby tradition, don’t inspire much in the way of mirth or affection.

Hornby’s trademark metaphors begin to grate, too. He may get away with comparing relationships to jigsaws (“You’re a telephone box, and I’m the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. We just wouldn’t look right together”) but relationships as atmospheric heat (“They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat”) is pushing it. And although he writes well about blinkered online communities, and has some fun inventing a Wikipedia page for Crowe, keeping his characters up to speed with technology only results in tedious descriptions of ripping CDs and e-mailing pictures: “Tucker stopped, and opened the photo library. He’d attached a picture to an e-mail a couple of times and he was pretty sure he could do it again.” (He succeeds, by the way.) Most importantly, though, the novel doesn’t add up to anything more than the sum of its parts: a series of loosely sketched scenes, hinging on an argument about an album of demos.

Annie spends much of the novel fretting about how much time she has wasted with Duncan: “We’re here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles? She would . . . never waste another second of however much time she had left to her.”

Reading Juliet, Naked isn’t exactly a waste of time. But I’d rather be building sandcastles.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (Viking, £18.99; Buy this book; 249pp)

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