May 31, 2021
Hoby (Neon in Daylight) delivers an accomplished take on class and protests against racial injustice. “That was just what you did on weekends—brunch and protest,” Luca Lewis wryly narrates in 2027, looking back on his time interning at a New York City magazine as a naive 22-year-old in 2016–2017. He yearns to befriend fellow intern Zara McKing, an attractive Black woman, but feels ashamed of his whiteness and unsure of how to be an ally. Luca also becomes enamored with Paula Summers, an artist working at the magazine, and her indie filmmaker husband, Jason Frank, and spends the summer with the couple and their five kids in Maine as Paula and Jason fight over how to respond to racial injustice (in the city, Jason took the kids to protests; in Maine, Paula insists on carrying on traditions such as a Fourth of July parade). Toward the end of the summer, Luca learns of a tragedy involving Zara during a protest. Hoby’s writing sparks with inventiveness (“The sky had a passive-aggressive quality, bruised clouds withholding their light while telling you they were fine”), and she offers insights on the damage of power imbalances in relationships. This speaks volumes on the shallowness of white privilege. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
Starred review from July 1, 2021
A recent college graduate with amorphous literary ambitions is taken up by a wealthy artist couple in the first months of the Trump years. As he becomes increasingly entwined in their lives, he finds himself questioning his own allegiances. With her second novel--following Neon in Daylight (2018)--Hoby returns to a favorite subject: unmoored young New Yorkers enmeshed in other people's lives. This time, it's Luca, a 22-year-old intern at a prestigious literary magazine called The New Old World, whose main ambition is to transcend his past as a chubby kid with a single mom from Broomfield, Colorado. "I wanted badly to be good; I wanted desperately to be liked," he explains, narrating from his perch more than a decade in the future. "It was easy to confuse the two." This will be the conflict of the novel, although it will take the better part of the next 300 pages for Luca to figure out that he is torn between two opposing poles. At one end, there is Zara, a wildly talented fellow intern, who is both the magazine's only Black employee and the lone voice against the publication's mealy-mouthed post-election attempt at "resistance." At the other, there are Jason and Paula, a glamorous couple with loose ties to the magazine who take Luca under their wing. He is transfixed by them, their effortless beauty and easy wealth; that summer, he accepts an invitation to join them at their home in Maine, and this, nearly halfway through the slow-burning, sometimes-florid novel, is where the book takes off. At first, Maine is idyllic, a blissed-out dreamscape of adulthood, but as the weeks pass into months, their relationships begin to show subtle signs of strain. But it is only when tragedy strikes back in New York that the spell is broken and Luca is left to reckon with himself--and choices he hadn't realized he was making. A small book about small things that becomes a big book about everything.
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Starred review from June 1, 2021
In 2017, 22-year-old Luca interns for literary magazine The New Old World, an institution. His New York City life is colored by ancient, gout-ridden editors; bumbling, white-led discussions of diversity; performative activism; and fretting over his conservative Colorado upbringing. At a magazine contributors' meeting, Luca meets painter Paula and her filmmaker husband, Jason, and thus begins a deeply psychological affair between the three. Luca's lust is to be as naturally talented and effortlessly alluring as the uber-rich artists; theirs is to be as young and naive as a recent grad. Luca is given an open chair at literati dinner parties, tickets to openings at MoMA, and an invitation to summer with Paula and Jason's family in Maine. Luca accepts, abandoning rational life in New York, particularly fellow intern Zara, a committed activist and arguably Luca's only friend. At the summer house, buoyed by an ocean of privilege, Luca ignores breaking news of the early Trump era. His inevitable crash back to Earth is rife with consequences that won't fully unravel for years to come. In her second book, a delicious meditation on morality, nostalgia, and art, Hoby (Neon in Daylight, 2018) searingly renders Luca's many worlds and lambasts insincere compassion with nuance.
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