Virtue

A Novel

By: Hermione Hoby

Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne

Named a Summer Must Read by Wall Street Journal, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, Esquire, Bustle, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Refinery29, and more

“[Hoby] might have just written the defining New York City novel of our fraught, socially anxious, and politically tumultuous times.” (Interview)

“Intense and addictive.” (The New York Times)

A powerful novel of youth, desire, and moral conflict, in which a young man is seduced by the mirage of glamour - at terrible cost.

Arriving in New York City for an internship at an elite but fading magazine, Luca feels invisible: smart but not worldly privileged but broke, and uncertain how to navigate a new era of social change. Among his peers is Zara, a young Black woman whose sharp wit and frank views on injustice create tension in the office, especially in the wake of a shock election that’s irrevocably destabilized American life. In the months that follow, as the streets of New York fill with pink-hatted protesters and the magazine faces a changing of the guard, Luca is taken under the wing of an attractive and wealthy White couple - Paula, a prominent artist, and Jason, her filmmaker husband - whose lifestyle he finds both alien and alluring.

With the coming of summer, Luca is swept up in the fever dream of their marriage, accepting an invitation to join the couple and their children at their beach house, and nurturing an infatuation both frustrating and dangerous. Only after he learns of a spectacular tragedy in the city he has left behind does he begin to realize the moral consequences of his allegiances.

In language at once lyrical and incisive, Virtue offers a clear-eyed, unsettling story of the allure of privilege and the costs of complacency, from a writer of astonishing acuity and vision.

©2021 Hermione Hoby (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Intense and addictive.... With a touch as light as a single match, Hoby scorches the earth beneath hollow social activism and performative outrage.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“I took such delight in Hoby’s prose.... Luca and Paula and Jason are skillfully drawn, each possessing a distinctive, nuanced personality and a complicated psyche, and Hoby’s gift for sensual description makes us feel we know them viscerally.” (Sigrid Nunez, New York Review of Books)

“[A] trenchant story of complacency and social consciousness.” (Esquire)

Keen Insights Yet A Bit Anticlimactic

I liked Hermione Hoby’s Neon in Daylight and Virtue affirmed the clear voice and good writing of this talented young author. She is adept at writing with keen insight about recent history, weaving compelling fiction and good characters from our reality. Virtue is a brave challenge as she writes about the plight of an earnest young man in an age of identity politics and political militants. She largely succeeds. The story is a bit anticlimactic — which admittedly is partially the point — but doesn’t quite live up to the buildup hinted by the narrative.

Snoozefest

This is sooooo slow and boring. The writing is cringeworthy and the narration, especially when reciting song lyrics, is laughably bad.