Virtue

An aggressively cheerful barmaid cajoled me into ordering the house cocktail, which arrived in a small coupe glass, the liquid within an embarrassingly fruity shade of puce, a mocking strawberry spliced and listing down the side, and I sat there with my effeminate cocktail, suppressing a shudder as I felt it sheath my teeth with sugar.

 

This was eleven years ago. By which I mean about a thousand, because back then I had of course zero idea that we were in the Before times. My pitiful twenty-third birthday and the Technicolored year that followed-that color-saturated, richly lit time of the two of them, Paula and Jason, my twin movie stars who for a moment were truly nothing less than my life-it all seems now to have happened on some discontinued film stock. This is how it goes, I guess, that people who were once more real to you than life itself eventually come to feel like stock photo models in a collection of well-framed shots imprinted on your once impressionable brain.

 

That November, though, I was newly arrived in the city, with few friends, or at least nobody with whom I wanted to eat either turkey or birthday cake. After Dartmouth, second-least impressive of the Ivies, I'd been anxious enough to delay adulthood as to spend a final school year at Oxford, where my voice became inflected with the rounded vowels of moneyed English youth-the same youth who had ribbed me, paid attention to me, and even kind of fetishized me for being a bloody Yank. In my first months in Manhattan, then, I was frequently mistaken for an English expat. With strangers, I usually went along with this, murmuring the lie "London" with a diffident smile when a cashier or barista asked where I was from. In truth, my hometown was Broomfield, Colorado, a newish agglomeration of prefab-looking housing developments squatting on flat, treeless land in a zone that was neither Denver nor Boulder and was distinguished by nothing but its in-betweenness. If I could offer you a defining image of my adolescence, it would look like this: I'm lying on my bed with the flat screen blaring downstairs and the little Morrissey who lives in my head is plaintively singing: "And when you want to live, how do you start?"

 

When the blazered Oxford

Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Achingly acute and ultimately shattering . . . [with] sparkling sentences and indelible characterizations to hold readers rapt. Shelf Awareness

"A small book about small things that becomes a big book about everything."  Kirkus (starred review)

Hoby s writing sparks with inventiveness. . . and she offers insights on the damage of power imbalances in relationships. [Virtue] speaks volumes on the shallowness of white privilege.    Publishers Weekly

A delicious meditation on morality, nostalgia, and art. . . . Hoby searingly renders Luca s many worlds and lambasts insincere compassion with nuance.   Booklist (starred review)

Hermione Hoby has a a high-wire command of language and a sensitivity for conjuring facets of being that I never knew could be described until I read Virtue. Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers

Hermione Hoby's Virtue kept me rapt from the very first page, intoxicated by the richness and surprise of its language, its wit, its keen attention to the layers of friction and attachment lurking beneath the surface of every conversation. Hoby s gaze is both cutting and generous: razor-sharp about social pieties without ever stooping to caricature. More than anything, Virtue illuminates the messiness of being human and trying to be good. Leslie Jamison, author of The Gin Closet and The Empathy Exams

Hermione Hoby has a way of rebuilding the world with astounding resonance and vividness. In Virtue, with bewitching precision, she captures the ominous beauty and soft underbelly of our protest summers. The result is both a sumptuous portrait of all-consuming attraction and a compassionate indictment of shallow social conscience. I loved this novel, and sank deep into its radiance and rot.    Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

An engaging and beautiful novel. Virtue resists easy moralizing, yet delivers an elbow-sharp, incisive dissection of the seductive nature of the privileges afforded to those on the favored side of inequality. Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Stakes Is High

A work of confident elegance and eerie familiarity for anyone who has ever been young, ambitious and blinded by perception. Sloane Crosley, author of The Clasp

Virtue bears satirical witness to contemporary American liberalism its pieties, its trinkets of cultural capital, its useless insights in brutally accurate detail.  A brilliant, funny, ultimately horrifying comedy of manners. Joseph O Neill, author of Netherland

Virtue is the first novel to deal directly with the intimate corrosions and self-betrayals wrought by the Trump years. In pearlescent prose, Hermione Hoby presents the struggles of a creative class caught between beauty and duty, on the eve of its dissolution. Marco Roth, author of The Scientists