Neon in Daylight

October 16, 2017
An Englishwoman named Kate arrives in contemporary New York with no plan and no prospects in Hoby’s promising debut novel. Kate has abandoned her PhD program and boyfriend, so disillusioned that “speaking anything out loud” has come to “feel like an audacity.” She finds two accomplices to the reinvention she seeks: Inez, a teenager Kate befriends after Inez confuses her for someone looking to buy Adderall, and Inez’s washed-up novelist father, Bill. Kate remains ignorant of their familial link even as the drugs Inez introduces her to fuel Kate and Bill’s “mutual seduction.” Though Hoby relies on a well-trod conceit in mirroring Kate’s quest for self-actualization with her exploration of New York, her sharp distillations of the demands the city makes of people energize the book’s familiar beats. Most memorable is Inez’s side hustle of fulfilling the fantasies of “Craigslist perverts,” surprising encounters that compensate for the more predictable moments. Indeed, even as a collision between Kate’s friendship and love affair becomes inevitable, Hoby wisely avoids posing the necessary confrontations as a resolution to Kate’s problems. This is a sharp novel with perceptive observations (at a gallery, “there’s something religious-looking about iPhones raised en masse”) and vivid, complicated relationships. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

October 15, 2017
A young British woman ditches both her boyfriend and her Ph.D. program for a temporary reprieve catsitting in New York City and finds herself enmeshed in the lives of a charismatic aging writer and his aggressively free-spirited daughter in Hoby's debut. Taking up residence in the budget boho home of her mother's one-time best friend--now off on a post-divorce round-the-world tour of self-discovery ("You gotta live, you know?" she advises)--Kate arrives in New York in the summer of 2012 with no particular plan except avoiding her actual life at home. She is lost--in the city, existentially--which makes her available to chance and amenable to risk, and it is in this unmoored state, riding the waves of the city, that she meets Inez, an arrestingly beautiful recent high school grad and lackluster barista who moonlights fulfilling the fantasies of men from Craigslist. It is a modern Shakespearian comedy that brings them together: Inez is waiting for someone named Kate to show up and buy Adderall and meets our Kate instead, a Kate, but not the one she is looking for, and the two strike up an uneasy friendship. Kate is attracted to Inez's edge; Inez is drawn to Kate's blank-seeming straightness. But the city, it turns out, is not all that big, and at a gallery opening (enormous paintings of video stills of pornography), Kate meets Bill, a one-hit wonder novelist who has, since his publication at 24, which was followed by a movie adaptation, become a professor, divorced, and assumed his position as bitterly cool dad. What Kate doesn't know on their first date-- doesn't know until an inevitable scene much later--is that he is, specifically, the father of Inez. Vivid as they are, both Bill and Inez never quite stop feeling like familiar sketches, types of people who never quite ascend to the status of individuals. Kate, meanwhile, rides their waves, a cypher, her distinguishing characteristic being her general lack of them. But Hoby is a master of atmosphere, and if the characters don't stick, the vibrant loneliness of the city does. Energetic, if uneven.

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December 1, 2017

In the stifling summer of 2012, 25-year-old Kate arrives in Manhattan from England on a six-month visa. She's catsitting in the apartment of her mother's friend, who's off on a postdivorce European jaunt. Timidly at first, Kate sets out to explore the city while tethered via Skype to her miserable boyfriend back home. Through an extraordinary series of coincidences, Kate independently meets 19-year-old Inez, a recent high school grad, and burned-out college professor Bill, the aging author of a decades-old, one-hit best seller, and becomes immersed in their drug- and alcohol-fueled worlds. Bill just happens to be Inez's father. As all three lurch into ever more dangerous behavior (Inez acts out perversion fantasies for men she finds on Craigslist), the tension and temperatures among the three urbanites continue to rise. VERDICT In language so vivid that readers could break a sweat in an igloo, debut novelist Hoby brings to life the seamy underworld of bright, bored people during a suffocating New York City summer, demonstrating the sure hand seen in works by Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2017
Kate's not sure if she's running away from England, where she has a boyfriend and an unfinished PhD, or toward New York and a too-good-to-pass-up housesitting opportunity. Either way, she finds herself dropped in Manhattan on the Fourth of July 2012. Drifting and feeling lonely, she takes up smoking with her first pack of American Spirits and soon meets magnetic 19-year-old Inez, a bad barista and a better recreational drug dealer, and Inez's hard-partying father, Bill, a professor and writer who found early fame not exactly on his own terms. (The three will remain unaware of their interconnectedness for some time.) A collaborative narration style, closely following Kate, Inez, and Bill, comes somewhat at the cost of deeper characterizations and creates several coincidental encounters, but it also makes for highly propulsive reading that keeps readers a half-step ahead of characters. With effortlessly fluid prose, Hoby, herself a New York transplant from London, excels most promisingly in depicting the vivid, perhaps most iconic American city, especially as seen through the eyes of a curious and perceptive newcomer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)