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knew by the end of the first sentence that I was going to be obsessed with Hermione Hoby's Virtue, Virtue is that extraordinary caliber of masterpiece in which readers recognize themselveswith both pleasure and horror and people who make up their community that they call lifeagain with both pleasure and horror.
I don't think it's possible to do justice to both Hermione Hoby's magnificent, singular prose and her keen insight into the contemporary moment, If one is looking for a novel that grapples with the internal and external struggles of contemporary society, Virtue is an excellent read to consult, This book read to me like a modern day Great Gatsby, Imagine, if Gatsby was a liberal woman inliving in Cobble Hill and made her living as an eccentric artist, I enjoyed the limited first person perspective similar to that of Gatsby in Luca, a youngsomething from Colorado learning to live in NYC,

I think Hoby is an excellent, beautiful and thoughtful writer, She made these characters so tangible and dynamic, I was just as addicted to figuring out mysterious Paula as Luca was,

I do wonder how someone who isnt “coastal elite” would like this book, Would they like it more because they havent been beaten over the head with such exhausting ideology Or would they roll their eyes and think it just another reflection of the echochamber that is NYC

Regardless, I did find this book thoughtful and provoking and very beautifully written.


I have a confession, my guilty pleasure is richpeopleproblem novels and this is a really enjoyable one, This NYC story has a modernday Gatsby vibe, with the narrator being a cipher, an outsider, a passive presence to the unfolding events, Set in the worlds of publishing, art, glamor and privilege, intern Luca nee Luke finds himself in a city fraught with political anxiousness, impressed by his woke but broke friends, at the time when Trump is first elected.
As he becomes embroiled in a toxic triangle whilst summering with a successful couple by the sea, naive Lucas initial infatuation wanes, and he begins to question the moral ambiguity of these people and his situation and see beneath the glossy surface.
Witty, sharp and full of the kind of people drama I love, A great summer read. a fantastic meditation on whiteness, richness, and indulgence that is pulpy but smart at points too, is there a third act vomit that makes zero sense and feels forced and unnecessary yes, other than that, there is a lot to like here, despite the slow start, more like a “Summers end is around the bend just flyin
The swimmin suits are on the line just dryin
Ill meet you there per our conversation
I hope I didnt ruin your whole vacation” John Prine

Set during thepresidential protests,yearold Luca just moved to New York City to work as an intern at a magazine.
He befriends a young black coworker named Zara who is very passionate about the protests since her brother was wrongly arrested, Luca wants to fight and help Zaras cause but instead, he decides to follow a wealthy white couple, Paula and Jason to their beach house in Maine, Luca finds himself desiring the couple and struggling to figure out his identity,

I'm a huge fan of John Prines music so the introductory quote immediately grabbed my attention, Going into this one I did expect this book to be similar to Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney but it ended up being very distinct,

Virtue was a very delightful story, I enjoyed the main character Luca but my favorite character was Zara, I admired her passion and I felt so much sympathy for her situation, Lucas's story is more a comingofage tale with an inner conflict of right and wrong,

Hermione Hobys character descriptions were fantastic, Her writing is very insightful into the character's thought process, I also had a certain expectation of how the story would end by Hermoine twisted the story and completely surprised me, I look forward to reading whatever she publishes next!

Virtue would be perfect for fans of contemporary fiction with social/political undertones,

Many thanks to Riverhead Books for the gifted copy of Virtue! Virtue is available now, This book was a lot, This is a beautifully written story about what it means to be good, to have virtue, in the face of political upheaval, mainly the election inof Donald Trump.
He is described as "the overlord of a white male underbelly of underlings: the incels and school shooters andchan trolls, "Hoby pits east coast elite liberals against those who actually get involved in political activism and fight for change,

Luca,, arrives in NYC after attending Dartmouth and Oxford, He takes a position as an intern for a highbrow literary magazine that seems very much like The New Yorker, The magazine is run by Bryon, an old white man with outdated ideas, Byron seems obsolete in. The narrator, Luca, recognizes that Byron was probably a good man, "Except inthere wasnt really such a thing as a good man, as far as I could tell.
This was our new doctrine, with, it must be said, a lot of evidence behind it, Masculinity was toxic and, masochists, we turned our gazes to our screens to watch the president confirm it daily, " Byron rarely published work by women or people of color,

Luca meets a fellow intern, Zara, She is the only black intern, is super smart, and the only one who speaks up at the magazine's Monday idea meeting where, agitated, she says “Dont do a roundtable on resistance writing,” she spat.
“Do resistance. ”Except for Zara, "We had zero experience or understanding of what practical politics meant, We didnt know what we were doing, We felt bad and we wanted to feel good, and that was all, " Zara was there to urge the group into action and complained about the "unpolitical politics of the culturati or whatever, " "Zara was talking about how this wasnt a time for sitting around thinking that poetry could change the world, "

Around the same time, Luca meetsyear old, wealthy Paula, an heiress and artist, and her husband Jason, a filmmaker, Paula invites Luca over for their weekly dinners, and ultimately to their summer house in Maine with the couple's five children, Rather than reading an essay Zara wanted Luca's opinion on, or spending the summer with her and the other interns, he drives to Maine in a borrowed car, turns off his phone for the summer, and ignores the political turmoil happening in the US.
During a party of other elite white people with summer homes in Maine, he briefly switches his phone on to learn that a young woman was hit by a car in Charlottesville as white supremists marched across the city.
He promptly turns his phone back off,

Only after a horrible tragedy does Luca realize that he messed up by aligning himself with elitists who ignore what's happening on the political front, Looking back in, Luca realizes that the weeks with Paula and Jason were the happiest of his life, but he wants to sever it from what happens later in his life.


The novel asks us how we can be good and virtuous and lead a meaningful life without really answering the question,



dnf

i could have pushed through but honestly i was bored out of my mind so my brain just gave up The worst book I've read in a while, maybe the worst "literary" fiction I've ever read.


What makes it so bad The writing and the main character,

The writing can be described as "good bad writing" or " bad good writing" honestly, they might be the same thing, Almost every single sentence contains two or three SAT words and an overworked simile, It reads as if you got a college student to parody big brain capitalL Literature, There's a couple of good passages like one about admiring people who mispronounce words because that means they're a reader, but's it's dialed up tofor the whole damn book.


The main character and narrator is a young Millennial/elder Zoomer who recounts his time in New York during the early days of the Trump administration.
He's an intern at an oldtimey literary quarterly staffed by an ancient blueblooded editorinchief, a famous artist who designs the covers, and a pack of cointerns including a Jezebel feminist and a BLM activist.
Halfway through the book the gig ends so he spends the summer in Maine with the artist, her filmmaker husband, and their children, The problem with this kid is that he's completely unbelievable, As someone on Netgalley said, he has the views and morals of a twitter leftist c, theelection. But he also admits to being totally clueless about issues of race and gender and doesn't know what people mean when they talk about race, gender, and politics.
Like, where does this person come from How does he exist

So why did I read this book I read sitelinkthe PW review and thought "that sounds completely unbelievable and wholly predictable.
" I predicted he was going to go to Maine and either sleep with the wife or have an awkward threesome with the couple, the tragedy would be an unarmed POC getting shot by police, and the falling out would the couple would be from one of them being like "Oh, he shouldn't have run from the cops" OR finding out that they're Trump donors.
. None of those things happened, What did happen was much more boring, I'm changing my rating from two "it was ok" to one star "did not like it", I read this book twice before feeling ready to review it, I was hoping that the few things that bothered me in an otherwise very enjoyable book could be explained away on the second read, . . unfortunately they just became more distracting, but that's probably my own fault for immediately rereading a book I had JUST finished,
First of all, Hermione Hoby is a beautiful writer, Her style of prose is one of the most memorable I've read in awhile, and I always appreciate when a writer is able to obsess me with a description of something as mundane as a fast food hamburger or, idk, Matt Damon's jawline for some reason that line about "Matt Damon's grim and sensuous jawline" really stuck with me lol.

Though I liked Neon in Daylight, a lot of things about it irked me unavoidably, and I think Virtue is proof that Hoby's skill is only improving.
Virtue manages to avoid many of the cliches that Hoby's first novel seemed to stumble into Neon in Daylight had a young woman getting with an older man in Virtue it's the reverse, and I think I prefer this mainly because it's so much less common , with many of its characters far better developed and real, and a much more gracefully rendered plot.
If you've read my reviews you know I'm one of those oldfashioned readers who likes just a bit of closure if it's no trouble, plz and thank u, and I think the end of Virtue provides just the right amount of resolution without it feeling forced or unbelievable.

Some of Virtue's characters are carefully developed and very flawed, such as the protagonist Luca, a millennial from a humble background trying to reinvent himself as an intellectual, who is more than a little pretentious and sexually confused I mean he's bisexual, but he doesn't seem to ever fully come to terms with it.
When he mentions early on that he speaks with a slight British accent after spending one! year in England, I expected to hate him too much to finish the book, but I think Hoby manages to keep him from being completely unbearable, even making him relatively sympathetic, while still being someone you'd like to grab and shake some sense into from time to time.
Similarly, Paula is realistically frustrating, as she has to be, in order to believably captivate Luca as much

as he says she did, Jason's characterization felt a bit more lackingI think maybe Hoby didn't know quite what to do with him, and he ends up having this kind of overlyperfect superhero vibe he's just SO woke, and there's literally one description that speculates about water droplets bouncing off his abs because he's so ripped.

That said yes you knew this was coming if some of these characters are so welldrawn, this seems to come at the expense of other, equally important characters.
Yes, we've arrived: let's talk about Zara, Oh boy.
Similarly to how I view Jason's characterization, it seems like Zara was a character Hoby knew had to be important, but wasn't sure quite what to do with on the page.
With Jason this worked a little better, because he's meant to be flawed in his sheltered wealth and overly grand, revolutionary ideas, but Zara seems intended to be superior to the rest of the cast, so when all of her conversations are about activism and social justice we're clearly supposed to respect her as a perfect heroine.
Unfortunately, unlike Luca or Paula or even many peripheral characters, Zara is not a real person, She's basically a New Yorker article in human form, a vehicle to remind us in the most intellectual way possible of the grave state of the world, especially when it comes to racism.
Because she's one of the few characters of color, this flattening out of her character feels kind of unfair, though on another level it makes senseI think many white writers are sometimes afraid to make brown and black characters anything other than impossibly good and intelligent.
Unfortunately this comes at the cost of Zara having no apparent flaws and worse, no apparent sense of humor!, Ironically at one point Luca describes listening to Zara speak in similar terms, saying it is as if something is "speaking through her" and there is "no more Zara.
" To me there was never any Zara, and the only thing speaking through her was the uncomfortable need to have a saintlike black character who shows everyone else the way.

If it hadn't been for Zara's death thisdimensionality would have been easier for me to overlook.
But because we learn what a significant part she ends up playing in Luca's life, I wish we'd gotten to know her and what he sees in her a little more before she was killed off.
I think maybe it's also easier to shy away from making a flawed character if you know that character is going to die.
But what Hoby did with Zara felt a bit cheap, especially after so many other, wellrendered characters, .