Bob Dylan admirers have got it wrong. Contrary to the widely held view, Dylan's 1975 Blood on the Tracks isn't the greatest breakup record ever made. In Nick Hornby's novel Juliet, Naked, the crown belongs instead to Juliet, the fifth release of the (fictional) American songwriter Tucker Crowe. In the opinion of one Crowe fan, at least, it is a "darker, deeper, more fully realized collection of songs than the overrated Blood on the Tracks."

But Tucker Crowe has never got Dylan's recognition. It didn't help that he withdrew from public life after releasing Juliet in 1986 and has been quiet for more than two decades since. Nor is the elusive singer, who soon decided his famous record was "full of melodrama and bullshit," an effective spokesman for it.

As for the cult following that grew up around his presumed descent into tortured-genius silence – think of Captain Beefheart more than the Nick Drake of romantic early demise – they are the usual sorts: nerds and misfits, guys full-time angry at the women who don't appreciate their passions. These digital days, fan sites and blogs give everybody voice to express their intemperate, ill-advised views.

Take English college lecturer Duncan Thomson, author of the righteous takedown of Blood on the Tracks. He is one such "Crowologist," and at the start of Juliet, Naked he is dragging his semi-acquiescent companion, Annie, on a pilgrimage to the United States. All Crowe pilgrims must start in the same spot. "They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet," Hornby writes on the opening page.

From there, the couple carry on to California, where Duncan takes it a step further by breaking into the Berkeley home of the "Juliet" of the album title, if only out of desperate need to urinate. The secret he discovers in her living room is certain to grant him extra cachet among his crowd.

Even better, on their return to the grim coastal town of Gooleness, Duncan is sent an advance copy of recently discovered acoustic demos from the Crowe masterpiece. Such is the purity of Juliet, Naked, as the release is called, that Duncan dashes off a plangent blog entry extolling its superiority over the completed version. His standing as the "Crowe completist" will now be assured.

Hornby's fifth novel is his second rock 'n' fiction. This is comfortable territory for the popular English novelist and critic. Sure enough, Juliet, Naked can be taken as a Volume 2 or B-side to 1995's High Fidelity. Music store own Rob Fleming from the earlier book would certainly recognize a fellow "anorak" – British slang for a man with an obsessive interest in an often-obscure subject – in the no-less-driven, sad-sack Duncan Thomson. Their women, too, would find much to lament together.

"It was terrifying," Annie thinks of what Duncan would do without Tucker Crowe to obsess over, "the prospect of having to engage with another human being without those crutches."

Soon, it turns out, he will be obliged to walk crutch-less. Hornby slowly draws the English couple, their own relationship in a steady unravel, closer to the "actual" American singer. The real Tucker Crowe, while not conforming to the burn-out clichés of his tiny anorak army, is his own kind of mess. He has too many children with too many ex-wives. He hasn't held a job, or earned money, in years.

He is also charming and self-aware, an advance on the gormless, unresolved males who tend to crowd Nick Hornby novels. Women are almost always better grounded, and museum custodian Annie is no different. Juliet, Naked counts on Tucker to embody rock 'n' roll's reckless charisma and on Duncan to evidence its failure as a substitute for developing a full life. The book then turns to Annie to sort out these illusions, and these men.

The love triangle, born of CDs and e-mails and, finally, face-to-face confrontations between middle-aged adults, is an ingenious construction, and Hornby advances the story via his usual clever dialogue. Ever cinematic in his plot constructions, if not in the often surprising depth to his characters, the novel feels ready from page one to be lifted onto the screen. That will surely happen soon.

But any film adaptation of Juliet, Naked will probably fail to capture the more substantial aspects of Hornby's gentle and humane vision of the muddled interactions between art and life, and between human beings themselves. This is a heavy theme played lightly in his work; still, it is everywhere at play.

About art, especially music, he is consistently insightful. So convincing, for example, are the descriptions and dissections of Crowe's music that one is tempted to go looking for his albums in shops. "One thing about great art," Duncan thinks after his first listen to Juliet, Naked, "it makes you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it."

Juliet, Naked is no less astringent about how hard people find it to communicate their feelings using language. A six-year-old boy meeting his half-sister for the first time avoids verb contractions because they are "inappropriate at occasions of this magnitude." Annie, critiquing her own e-mail, decides that she doesn't need to be honest with herself, "not when the missing subordinate clause suggested so much emptiness."

Music, of course, is one way of narrowing the gap; it speaks of our feelings and yearnings, even our emptiness, with greater eloquence than most words. Hornby, who recently told a Canadian interviewer that he is trying to write a novel that resembles a great song, is often accused of being too much a product of pop culture, content with surface emotions and easy effects. Yet Blood on the Tracks, also ostensibly a product of that culture, is a work of art. Like the music of Tucker Crowe, Juliet, Naked can't compete with the genius of Bob Dylan. But it contains much of that authentic feeling, and some of that power.