Virtue by Hermione Hoby

Virtue Reviews

• 
  Karen Foster

  I have a confession….my guilty pleasure is rich-people-problem novels and this is a really enjoyable one. This NYC story has a modern-day 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 Luca’s 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.
• 
  Jake

  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 capital-L 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 to 100% for 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 old-timey literary quarterly staffed by an ancient blueblooded editor-in-chief, a famous artist who designs the covers, and a pack of co-interns (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. the 2020 election. 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
  the 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 stars ("it was ok") to one star ("did not like it").
• 
  Paul

  Imagine "The Great Gatsby" without Gatsby, and "Brideshead Revisited" without Brideshead, and you get this book . . . "The Great Revisited."
  
  Early in the Trump administration, a young man decides to leave New York to spend the summer with rich friends in Maine instead of protesting on the streets with one of his fellow former interns at a "New Yorker"-style magazine. That's it. That's the premise of this novel. A boring NPR feature gets stretched out over 300 pages. The filler, it must be said, is gorgeous and beautifully observed. But that's all it is, observed, not lived, which is kind of what you expect in a book about a passive wallflower of a character who attaches himself to wealthier, more charismatic people . . . but you at least expect them to be observing something, be it the downfall of an aspirational bootlegger or the decline of an aristocratic family. Luca, formerly Luke (that tells you everything you need to know about him), has no Sebastian or Julia, and his equivalent to Daisy and Gatsby are already married and have a home full of improbably well-behaved stepchildren. Meanwhile, bad things are going on in the world.
  
  And that's the most annoying aspect of "Virtue," that it joins "Missing Children Archive" in the new but (I hope) small category of Empathetic Tragedies, books in which nothing happens to the privileged characters but they at least feel guilty that they aren't suffering as much as the people they read about in the news. Maybe Ms. Hoby is trying to satirize such people. They aren't worth the effort she puts into it.
• 
  quynh

  that was definitely a book! she sure did write words!
• 
  Erin Glover

  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 in 2016 of Donald Trump. He is described as "the overlord of a white male underbelly of underlings: the incels and school shooters and 4chan trolls."Hoby pits east coast elite liberals against those who actually get involved in political activism and fight for change.
  
  Luca, 23, 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 2016. The narrator, Luca, recognizes that Byron was probably a good man, "Except in 2016 there wasn’t 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 “Don’t 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 didn’t 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 wasn’t a time for sitting around thinking that poetry could change the world."
  
  Around the same time, Luca meets 49-year 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 2028, 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.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Jaylen

  By turns intimate and incisive, Virtue is a novel preoccupied with morality, desire, and memory in our present moment in which signaling one’s activism is believed to be a litmus test for goodness. Hoby interestingly seems to be eschewing any possibility of autofictional assumptions, as is common in recent contemporary texts - the narrator is Luca, a man in his thirties recounting the events of his early twenties following Trump’s inauguration and working as an intern for a prestigious literary magazine in New York. Here he meets an older, privileged white couple and spends the summer at their house in Maine, yearning for their affections and grappling with his identity. While in his bubble of desire, his friend and co-intern Zara, a Black woman reeling from her brother’s recent arrest, engages in activism back in New York with devastating consequences.
  
  The characters at the forefront of Virtue are disaffected, resolved to make a change yet unable to do so, pursuing virtuosity through art despite general inaction. Luca’s reflections on the events of this summer as a now-married father express an internal battle between virtuosity and happiness and his determination of whether these ideals can be reconciled. The book questions the repercussions of nostalgia and choice, and the hollowness of liberalism when rooted in performance. Aside from my enjoyment of Hoby’s critical insight through her rendering of these characters, the novel is excellent in terms of its descriptions of art and power imbalances in relationships. I was surprised by many of the narrative decisions made here, and found it to be in conversation with some of my favorite reads this year, including Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, Second Place by Rachel Cusk, and Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Highly recommend.
  
• 
  Kasi Erickson

  Pretentious writing with a shitty main character. Did not like it.
• 
  Emily Carlin

  Not sure what to rate this one.
  
  This was very crushable, esp. as someone who shares some close-but-not-exact demographics with Luca (Boulder to his Broomfield, 24 to his 23 in 2016, Boston to his New York).
  
  Some great writing here and some delightfully observed social details. Not much to sink one’s teeth into, politically, though, imo.
  
  This absolutely doesn’t matter but I feel compelled to shout into the void: I got annoyed by two tech references that didn’t track, temporally. First, Luca’s mom selling stuff on Etsy when he was a kid (people did not use Etsy in the early aughts, at least not in Colorado). Second, him curating Spotify playlists in high school….mp3s, iPods, even mix CDs were the only games in town for normal ppl pre-2011. On the other hand, who cares.
• 
  Madeleine

  A political novel in the same key as The Emperor’s Children, full of interesting questions about racism in the literary world. The prose is beautiful but the plot’s sometimes slow and repetitive, lampooning the same subjects/behaviors over and over again. I do wish that Zara had been given more depth as not only an advocate but also a character — would have been far more fascinating as a more fully fleshed out counterpoint to white liberalness.
• 
  Jeroen Pen

  Wie dit niet leest is gek.
• 
  Sarah Paolantonio

  SPOILERS!
  
  Virtue was entertaining. Smart prose and a sharp read. I devoured it in three days after a long summer read of Moby Dick. I needed something to stare into, a palate cleanser. It was easy to read but important to remember that just because a book is easy to read it doesn't mean it's easy to write.
  
  This book is so On The Nose it's silly. Influencers, a prestigious literary/news magazine, the art world, being broke in NYC, Instagram, Twitter, an indie filmmaker, a character who dresses as a painting for Halloween, the 2016 presidential election without ever really being named and everything that comes with it (also without being named, but also pussy hats, a march of women, etc.) filtered through our narrator: a white man named Luca. Hoby did this on purpose. There is a reason behind every choice in this book and if you don't understand that from the start I can see how it could rub you the wrong way.
  
  Plot chugs along seamlessly, so much so it's almost uncanny. Of course Luca is a struggling, broke intern from nowhere Colorado. He befriends rich artists accidentally (which feels on accident but even though we know Luca is shy and awkward, he wants to be something he is not and only acts to please) and of course is invited to their Maine home for the entire summer. Luca slips into their family and routine effortlessly. Things unfold. Privilege is acknowledged, debated even. Actually, he overhears it. The debate happens behind closed doors, a personal fight between husband and wife, the kind of conversation no one is meant to hear and it is just what we need to hear. He also listens to them have sex. Luca and the situation that unfolds around him is weird and, somehow, feels so real it could be a story a friend you lost touch with from college would retell.
  
  Eventually it starts to build. Luca eludes to something about halfway through the novel, as in 'I wish it ended this way instead of what actually happened.' I was gearing up. But not for violence, and for a disturbing sexual violent behavior that really came out of nowhere. But the more I think about it and what Hoby is doing with this book--as commentary, as satire--it makes sense. She needed a white male character, she needed him to be shy and voiceless, and she needed him to act out perversely. It is a conversation about now. Pandemics, plural, are mentioned. Hoby writes from the present. And I have to hand it to her. I can see this whole idea/structure/concept/satire going wrong and I am sure there are many books, novels and nonfiction, out there doing this already and more to come as the publishing machine continues to capitalize on human suffering, death, and the great American political crumble (or, at least, white America's realization of it). Hoby got to it ahead of the curve. Kudos.
  
• 
  linn

  dnf @ 58%
  
  i could have pushed through but honestly i was bored out of my mind so my brain just gave up
• 
  Makena Riendeau

  This book read to me like a modern day Great Gatsby. Imagine, if Gatsby was a liberal woman in 2016 living 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 young 20-something 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 isn’t “coastal elite” would like this book. Would they like it more because they haven��t been beaten over the head with such exhausting ideology? Or would they roll their eyes and think it just another reflection of the echo-chamber that is NYC?
  
  Regardless, I did find this book thoughtful and provoking and very beautifully written.
  
  
• 
  Zak

  I 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 themselves-with both pleasure and horror- and people who make up their community that they call life-again 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.
• 
  helen reinhold

  this was so intriguing and well written and i learned a lot of new words reading it. i do, however, need to stop accidentally reading books set during 2016 but that’s on me i don’t know how i missed that in the synopsis.
• 
  Amy

  I feel like I liked this one more than it deserved. Like it's trying to go nowhere with unlikable characters or something. I do like her writing but this was kind of a tough hang.
• 
  Liz | thebohobookblogger

  This book was a lot.
• 
  Kyle Fitzpatrick

  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 3.9.
• 
  Brit Bucklee

  I gave this a good college try but admittedly could not finish it. I think a combination of being force-fed social commentary through the vessel of a self-deprecating lead left me rolling my eyes every other page.
• 
  Sandra

  I learned of this book in either the NYT Review of Books or the New Yorker, and got it from the library. I read all of it, however it did prove to be another in a long line of books I wanted to like but didn’t. Halfway through it I realized that nothing ultimately was going to happen, but I will say that the writing was fresh and crisp enough to keep me reading to the bitter end in the hope that I was wrong. Nope, I wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t a good read. It seems that the author hasn’t lived much and this was a boring heap of decent prose. I can’t believe I actually read it all.
• 
  Summer

  “Summer’s end is around the bend just flyin’
  The swimmin’ suits are on the line just dryin’
  I’ll meet you there per our conversation
  I hope I didn’t ruin your whole vacation” - John Prine
  
  Set during the 2016 presidential protests, 22-year-old 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 Zara’s 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 Prine’s 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 coming-of-age tale with an inner conflict of right and wrong.
  
  Hermione Hoby’s 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.
• 
  Amy Young

  Wildly pointless. If this story meant to releases itself from its own themes through irony, it and its narrator did not succeed. I won’t publish spoilers, but in 2021 with a book about (what exactly? maybe stereotypes?), how are we still writing those arcs (citing the Statue of Liberty here, iykyk), with lacks of nuance or inspiration, or aspiration? What was there to covet? What even were we meant to focus on?
  
  Really, really worth the skip
• 
  Maya

  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 old-fashioned 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 (1!) 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 lacking--I think maybe Hoby didn't know quite what to do with him, and he ends up having this kind of overly-perfect 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 well-drawn, 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 sense--I 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 saint-like black character who shows everyone else the way.
  If it hadn't been for Zara's death this 2-dimensionality 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, well-rendered characters.