Nick Hornby's novel "Juliet, Naked" is set in a fictional and downcast English seaside town called Gooleness, where we meet a fractious and downcast couple, Annie and Duncan. They live together, unmarried and joyless. Mr. Hornby nimbly evokes Annie's frustration, both emotional and sexual: "Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who'd come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years."

A third person is spectrally (and later literally) involved in the couple's relationship. Tucker Crowe is an American musician who, though once a critics' darling, appears to have lived in seclusion since abruptly retreating from the spotlight in 1986. Duncan is utterly fixated on Crowe, becoming one of the leading lights—a "Crowologist" and "scholar" in his own words— on a Web site dedicated to minute analysis of the singer-songwriter's life and work.

We are, in other words, deep in Hornby country. As a memoirist and novelist, Mr. Hornby has pursued a few recurring themes, including the challenge of finding a masculinity that is sensitive without being wimpy, and the attraction of obsessive fandom, especially regarding sports or music. His style—whether in "Fever Pitch," the soccer- supporter's memoir that made his name in 1992, or the music-saturated novel "High Fidelity" (1995)—blends dry humor, a dash of sentimentality and immense readability. He has sold more than five million books to date, even as some critics have complained that his pop-culture enthusiasms and guys-and-their-problems focus make his work the male equivalent of chick-lit.

"Juliet, Naked" will neither win over his detractors nor disappoint his admirers. The title refers to an unreleased album by Crowe, an acoustic, barebones version of his most famous work, "Juliet." A copy of the hitherto-unknown album falls into Duncan's hands, and he soon writes a rhapsodic online review. Annie, who respects Crowe's music but has none of her partner's fanaticism, is so irked by Duncan's hyperbole that she posts her own lukewarm appraisal.

To Annie's astonishment, she receives an admiring email reply from Crowe himself. It turns out that he is not the semi-crazed recluse that his dwindling band of diehard fans imagine. He is a middle-age man living a relatively normal, if domestically messy and financially straitened, life in Pennsylvania. The correspondence between Crowe and Annie, and their eventual meeting, provides much of the novel's narrative.

Mr. Hornby's humorous touch is very much intact. Annie's visits to her inept and priggish therapist, Malcolm, are comic gems. She becomes convinced that the goal of analysis is to torture patients with silence until they "eventually shout out 'I slept with my father!' and everyone could go home."

Elsewhere, Crowe ponders the role that his professional inactivity has played in the collapse of several relationships: "All of these women had known that he hadn't done anything since 1986; that, it seemed to him, was his unique selling point, and it was a never-ending source of fascination. But when he'd continued to do nothing, there was outrage. Where was the justice in that?"

Even peripheral characters, like a bluff local councilman and a couple of aging lotharios named Gav and Barnesy, are well-drawn and sometimes poignant. Mr. Hornby's casual turns of phrase can be especially telling, as when Crowe realizes that he has wasted two decades waiting for the muse to return. The wait, he reflects, has "felt like one long flick through a magazine."

Juliet, Naked

By Nick Hornby
Riverhead, 406 pages, $25.95

"Juliet, Naked" is solid but lacks the punch of the superb "High Fidelity." Minor but irritating flaws crop up, particularly the tendency of all three main characters to dwell at odd moments on matters of syntax and grammar. In a scene when Duncan confesses to cheating on Annie, for instance, she asks: "Who are you sleeping with?" He replies: "It's not . . . I wouldn't use the present continuous." At other points, Annie pronounces herself surprised by "the combination of Gooleness and an active verb," and Crowe, when Annie asks him if he might be interested in her, answers: "The conditional is unnecessary." This sounds less like characters speaking than an author letting the curtain slip. More seriously, the book's final chapters have an underdeveloped feel as the narrative begins to dawdle before a rather contrived intervention from a minor character hastens its conclusion.

Still, "Juliet, Naked" is a rich and perceptive novel, with a keen sense of the lives led by the trio at its core. Duncan gradually realizes that his ardent consumption of every morsel of Crowe-related information is a way of compensating for his stunted emotional life. Crowe struggles, usually unsuccessfully, with the question of how to marry his freewheeling artistic spirit to the demands of adult life. And Annie is a case study in how caution can lead, just as surely as recklessness, to a lifetime's worth of regrets.

—Mr. Stanage is the author of "Redemption Song: Barack Obama—From Hope To Reality" (Liberties Press/ Dufour Editions).