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    Neon in Daylight: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Neon in Daylight: A Novel
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    Neon in Daylight: A Novel
    Ebook257 pages4 hours

    Neon in Daylight: A Novel

    By Hermione Hoby

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

    "A radiant first novel. . . . [Neon in Daylight] has antecedents in the great novels of the 1970s: Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. . . . Precision—of observation, of language—is Hoby’s gift. Her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

    "What do you get when a writer of extreme intelligence, insight, style and beauty chronicles the lives of self-absorbed hedonists—The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City, and now Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby paints a garish world that drew me in and held me spellbound. She is a marvel." —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth

    New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. She has two unfortunate responsibilities during her time in America: to make regular Skype calls to her miserable boyfriend back home, and to cat-sit an indifferent feline named Joni Mitchell.

    The city has other plans for her. In New York's parks and bodegas, its galleries and performance spaces, its bars and clubs crowded with bodies, Kate encounters two strangers who will transform her stay: Bill, a charismatic but embittered writer made famous by the movie version of his only novel; and Inez, his daughter, a recent high school graduate who supplements her Bushwick cafe salary by enacting the fantasies of men she meets on Craigslist. Unmoored from her old life, Kate falls into an infatuation with both of them.

    Set in a heatwave that feels like it will never break, Neon In Daylight marries deep intelligence with captivating characters to offer us a joyful, unflinching exploration of desire, solitude, and the thin line between life and art.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateJan 1, 2018
    ISBN9781936787760
    Unavailable
    Neon in Daylight: A Novel

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    Reviews for Neon in Daylight

    3/5

    23 ratings5 reviews

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    • 1/5
      A fancy title doesn’t guarantee a good book. Not even if the setting is New York. I don’t think I’ve ever felt disgusted by a novel before, but I suppose we live and learn, right? I can’t begin to tell you how much I wanted to love this work, I was already positively pre-occupied with it. It had an interesting blurb, a striking cover, a Londoner deciding to live in New York. What could go wrong? Well, as far as I am concerned, everything went wrong…

      First of all, what’s wrong with Billy bookcases? Does the writer know how many beautifully, wonderfully clattered readers have found their lives’ solution in pretty Billy? Get off your high horse, please, and yes, that was rude!

      So, the story is that Kate, a London girl, decides to stay in the Big Apple temporarily, leaving George, her boyfriend, behind. In New York, she meets Bill and his daughter, Inez. And if you haven’t guessed already, the book continues to show how each one’s life is changed by these magnanimous encounters. Yes, it is a story that places human relationships in its centre and tries to develop itself around the issue of living in a culture that is quite different form your own. This would make for a great read. Except it quickly turns into something else. What I felt- and this is my strictly personal opinion, mind you- was that I was reading an excuse for porn and swearing. And it goes without saying that I don't read this kind of ‘’books’’, sorry.

      Where to begin? The characters were so bad I feel I’m lacking all the proper adjectives to describe them. Kate is as interesting as an undecorated white wall and then some. She is meek, docile. I mean, picture this: she supposedly has the courage to start a life in a new country, but not the determination to interact with people, acting like a frightened mouse and finding solace in smoking. And Skype. She tries out a new hair-cut as a revolutionary act, except it’s a hairstyle previously demanded by her controlling boyfriend.

      Bill wasn’t a person, but a cardboard figure. Gross and indifferent. His daughter, the nineteen year old Inez, was a much different case. Yes, she had potential, I'll grant you that. I am all for expressing yourself and I’d like to believe that I am open-minded, but her ‘’look at me, I’m a bad girl’’ attitude doesn’t make for an interesting character without some skill. She is drug-crazed and sex-crazed, and excuse me, by my personal standards, this is not literature.

      Mediocre writing, mediocre prose, horrible dialogue, indifferent descriptions. It’s the first time I read a book set in New York and I didn’t feel transported to the city. The writer failed to do that, in my opinion. I found that some effort has been made with elements taken from other urban contemporary novels but they weren’t used well. There was too much unnecessary emphasis on sex, too much swearing. I don’t understand what was the point of it, it made the novel utterly tasteless, almost pornographic in nature. If you want to shock- although this is very difficult in our times, because we have read and done everything- if you want to break the system, you need to have the chops as a writer to make it work. I am sorry, but in this case, I didn’t see that.

      There’s so much good material in the Contemporary genre, so many excellent efforts and debuts that books like this one make me think that they have nothing to offer. Yes, my standards are high, my tastes particular and I am used to a different quality of language and themes. There were too many times when I seriously thought I should abandon it. It’s supposed to be a novel about immigration, running free from what keeps you chained on the ground and finding yourself. I failed to notice whether any of these happened throughout the course of the story. What I did find were miserable, empty people and a kind of language I’d usually hear in a basketball derby between Panathinaikos and Olympiacos (If you are a basketball fan, like yours truly, you’ll know what I’m talking about.) I’m far from a prude, nor do I shy away from controversial material. This isn’t controversial, though. I doubt whether it’s even a ‘’material’’. Don’t try to pass mediocre writing and constant swearing and porn as innovative or daring. It has been done before with dubious results.

      I am never one to say ‘’oh, there’s one star, I’ll never read this book.’’ I don’t like this behaviour. It is hypocritical and presumptuous. I urge you to give every book a try, even the ones that I considered a disaster because your chances may be better. In this case, however, and honest to God, I have difficulty to do so now. I don’t think that vulgarity without any purpose is a token of a book that wants to be taken seriously. Possibly the worst book I’ve managed to finish this year…And if there was any underlying deep piece of wisdom about life, I failed to notice.

      Many thanks to Catapult and Edelweiss for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.



    • 2/5
      Well. It least it was a quick read. It is truly hard to fathom how such a boring, uninteresting book like this ever got published.The story takes place in NYC between a hot summer and hurricane Sandy not that it mattered and neither event has any baring on the story, but the book is about 3 terribly stereotypical, boring, self absorbed people.Kate is visiting from England, staying at a friend of her mothers place while the friend is doing her mid life crisis Eat, Pray, Love world trip- the author's words not mine, (I know how cliche). Apparently Kate is taking a break from earning her Ph.d in whatever and taking a break from her needy boring boyfriend. This is quite surprising because Kate is hands down the most boring main character I have read about in years. She is so confused about life, overly self conscious to the point of tragedy, and completely lacking any life experiences or personality.Inez is a completely screwed up, sexually confused, 19 year old, who works at a coffee shop, has a reputation for offering horrible customer service- again a detail that has no bearing on the story, and is also a part time prescription drug dealer in the park, and has decided to answer Craigslist personal ads and provide kink sexual services- none of which are interesting, erotic, or worth reading about. She spends most waking hours drunk or high and goes barefoot everywhere.Inez's father-William is a burned out author famous for writing 1 book, that everyone read, and has done nothing since, but be a drunk who blacks outs and passes out, and qualify for being the worst parent of the year, repeatedly.Guess what happens.Kate meets Inez.Kate separately meets William Neither William nor Inez, say the others name to KateKate's sort of falls for WilliamInez finds outAndNOTHING!!! The book ends.The only reason the book gets 2 stars is I like the author's writing, she just needs a story next time that doesn't fit on a cocktail napkin, and is about people who are actually interesting, which I would not think would be that hard considering she lives in New York City, and is from England- wow what a coincidence.
    • 3/5
      Kate, the young British protagonist of Hermione Hoby’s Neon in Daylight begins her tenure in New York City standing outside the locked brown door of the apartment where she’ll be cat-sitting during one of the hottest summers on record. At the novel’s close, she’s looking out the window at a bright red-and-yellow awning “buckling violently” in the winds of Hurricane Sandy. An apt analogy for the transformation her life undergoes, from dull and static to unpredictable and wild, that is largely occasioned by her relationships with two savvy New Yorkers – Bill, a well-known writer, and Inez, his hard-partying teenaged daughter.Hoby, like her protagonist, is a UK expat living in New York and this novel is a love letter of sorts to the lure of the Big Apple. After her boyfriend angrily recoils from when she makes an inflammatory remark at a party, Kate, like so many before her, leaves her old life behind and comes to the City seeking transformation and connection. After cutting off her long brown hair, bleaching it platinum and purchasing a tube of pricey crimson lipstick, she soon meets David and Inez, independently of one another, and she comes into her own as a result of her experiences with them, both good and bad. Throughout the story, people reach out in ways both small and large, from the friendly bodega clerk’s dashed expectations of a “chat or joke” with Kate to the fetishistic fantasies of the men Inez meets on Craigslist. Again and again, these encounters seem to mirror the vulnerability in Kate’s literal reaching out to her boyfriend and the harsh reality of his rejection. Kate’s radical transformation is not only physical, but psychological as well. She arranges to meet Lauren, a friend from London, at a gallery opening only to find they no longer have anything in common. Lauren seems dull and staid compared to the sort of life Kate is seeking and their meeting is awkward and strained. Inez, as well, must transform herself to fulfill the fantasies of her Craigslist tricks. She’s a child on the cusp of adulthood and this dangerous pursuit is not only a way to make money, but to act out against her self-involved and indifferent father. This is an interesting, well-constructed story. I love fiction about New York City and Hoby really captured its energy and atmosphere. Unfortunately, the characters didn’t move me. The women fared better than Bill, who struck me as somehow underdeveloped or not fully explored, but I had a difficult time caring about any of them. Academically, this is a good book but emotionally, it left me cold.
    • 2/5
      Another reviewer on LT wrote "I love a good New York story". So do I, and that's probably why I 'randomly' chose this book from the library shelf. Unfortunately, although it is indeed a 21st century New York story, I did not find it to be a good one. The characters were uninteresting to me, and were shallowly presented. Their lives and their thoughts were of little interest to me. The writing itself was nothing special. I did get an impression of New York City, but I expect (actually, I'm sure) others have done that much better.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this even though it didn't really go anywhere to speak of. I like a good New York story—especially a good downtown New York story—and Hoby carries the book with a super sharp observational voice. Not a lot of plot, and only one character actually makes any kind of inner progress—and not very much at that. But as a slightly acid-tongued travelogue, it was fun. Hoby has a good sense of looking around and taking in the city, and for that alone it was a worthwhile read (though if you're not amused by tales of wayward downtown New Yorkers, then skip it—I myself love them deep in my little dark heart, having been one myself many moons ago).