December 16, 2021 79British accent.” And that’s not the only
baffling thing. Eleven years later the
question remains: “Did I want to fuck
Jason? Or just be Jason and fuck his
wife?” The reader is teased with the
possibility that he will at some point
fuck one or the other or both, that they
might even have a threesome—a pos-
sibility that gathers strength after he
accepts their invitation to spend the
summer with them and their five chil-
dren at their home in Maine.
More a member of the household
than a guest—yet at the same time far
from being on an equal footing with
them—Luca now has a chance to ob-
serve his movie stars up close. Certain
flaws of which he was already aware—
egotism, hypocrisy, condescension, ma-
nipulativeness—become pronounced,
and he is witness to more than one
petty marital squabble. One day, the
usually gregarious and extroverted
Paula transforms into an art monster,
withdrawing indefinitely to work in her
studio, absenting herself from all social
and family life, including the care of
her three- year- old daughter. For once,
Luca’s mother looks good to him: “My
mom had never done this, even when
I might have wished she would: she’d
never disappeared.”If familiarity breeds a measure of con-
tempt, Luca remains in thrall to the
couple—in particular Paula, whose
dynamic personality never ceases to
impress him (“No one has ever been
more alive than Paula”)—and to the
panache and comfort of their life-
style. The Fourth of July parade in
their Maine village includes a compe-
tition for the best float, and Paula al-
ways wins. “Winning was important to
Paula,” Luca tells us. “She was a hap-
pily ruthless competitor in all things.”
And, admiring her later: “[She] made
art, but more than this she made things
happen: excitement, beauty, a sense
that wherever she was, the center of the
world was too.” It is easy for Luca to
still the inner voice that tells him that,
whatever Paula’s and Jason’s qualities,
perhaps theirs are not the highest val-
ues a person can, or should, aspire to.
Almost in the same breath that she
admits “I don’t know them,” Zara
judges Paula and Jason based on their
type: maybe not bad, but “not that
good,” and she disapproves of Luca’s
going away with them. But looking
back years later, Luca recalls:I never heard either of them ever
say a bad word about anyone. Not
once. Yes, they were rich peo-
ple—Wagyu and fiddleheads up
the wazoo—so it was easy to hate
them for that. But never to direct
their energy into unkindness—
that seemed more meaningful to
me than their diet or whatever else
they consumed. Did it matter that
their car was a Tesla, that their
candles were from Diptyque, that
all their brands were rich- people
brands?To dismiss Paula and Jason, as Zara
does—and as I suppose many readers
will too—as “classic bougie liberals” is
to ignore something important. Luca
isn’t bedazzled by Paula and Jason just
because they are privileged and rich.
Trump is privileged and rich. Paula and
Jason may be acquisitive, but they are
also cultivated. They are not just con-sumers but creators of beauty. Jason is
a diligent parent who in recent years
has put aside moviemaking to devote
himself to “full- time dadding.” He and
Paula are as unlike the deserting father
and boorish mother that fate dealt Luca
as any two people could be, and their
upper- class pastoral haven could not be
farther from his benighted hometown.
“I’d grown up with no beauty!” Luca
recalls thinking on his way home from
Paula and Jason’s Brooklyn house that
first magical evening. “The truth of this
hit me bright and cold. I want to make
my life more beautiful!—I felt the im-
pulse as if it were a pledge—to make
up for lost time, to claim all the beauty
I believed was owed me.” His expecta-
tion that going to Maine will help ful-fill this dream turns out to be correct.
There, “it felt like everything was made
of poetry.”
Not wanting his idyll spoiled, Luca
tries to forget everything else, from
his lonely mother to the accumulating
threats to democracy hatched by the
new administration. He even turns off
his phone. But come August there’s
no hiding from the news of the violent
Unite the Right rally that takes place in
Charlottesville, Virginia.
Beyond being shaken and appalled,
Luca wants to know, “What could one
person do?” With the insight and mor-
dant honesty that, for all his failings,
are characteristic of his narration, he
goes on, “I knew already that some-
thing was better than nothing but also
already anticipated that the something
would often feel just so small and feck-
less as to make the lure of nothingness
come alive.”
Nothingness in the face of white su-
premacy having no lure whatsoever
for Zara—all but forgotten by Luca in
Maine, along with “the big and ugly
and untenable world of systems and
suffering”—she is now a fully commit-
ted activist for Black Lives Matter. She
publishes an essay, “Abolish the Liter-
ary,” in which she deplores magazines
like The New Old World for being a lie
based on white domination, and calling
it, in Luca’s paraphrase, “a monstrous
pretense...to think that culture, sup-
posedly an affirmation of humanity,can survive its separation from the de-
nial of humanity that is America’s rac-
ist society.”
“Zara’s piece made me miserable,”
Luca confesses. Miserable about how
working at the magazine “had been
maddening and exhausting and de-
pressing for Zara, and about how
morally complicated and doomed ev-
erything seemed.” But truth be told, “I
was mainly miserable with envy. Zara
wrote so well.... She’d probably get a
book deal.”
Only a week later, Zara’s attempt at
a courageous and radical act of protest
goes horribly wrong. The consequences
devastate Luca and put an immediate
end to his infatuation with Paula and
Jason. In an instant, his life is changed
profoundly. If, just months earlier, ev-
erything was possible because noth-
ing bad had happened yet, this bad,
this terrible thing that has happened
appears to mean that now nothing is
possible—despite the facts that Luca is
in no way responsible and it’s unlikely
that he could have done anything to
prevent it.But because Zara has disappeared
for so long from the story, and also be-
cause Luca’s friendship with her has
not been given the kind of development
Hoby gives to his friendship with Paula
and Jason, this dramatic turn lacks
force. A deeper problem, though, is
the character of Zara herself. 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 viscer-
ally—down to how their pillows smell
in the morning. Zara—beautiful, righ-
teous, “conspicuously” smarter than
all four of the magazine’s other in-
terns (and seemingly everyone else), a
woman of spotless integrity and heroic
guts—is less an individual than a col-
lection of merits.
“She was funny, too!” Luca tells us.
And yet she doesn’t come across as
particularly funny. Nor are the sugges-
tions she makes at the New Old World
meeting, though indisputably good
ones, particularly brilliant or original.
I wasn’t sure what to make of her pro-
ducing, at twenty- two, a masterpiece of
an essay that is “at several points too
smart and recursive in its sentences”
for Luca, a Dartmouth- and Oxford-
educated man, “to follow properly,”
but it would have been more convinc-
ing if some of those cerebral bits had
been quoted. And would a smart po-
litical polemicist make the mistake of
writing above the heads of the people?
Given our national historical mo-
ment, it seems right for Hoby to want to
make Zara the novel’s moral center. But
why couldn’t she be exemplary without
being a paragon? For me, Luca’s ha-
giographic vision of Zara diminished
her reality, and his bitter disillusion-
ment and obsessive self- blame for “all
the ways I’d failed her” seem to partake
of a similar exaggeration:I’d spent my summer with a pair of
people who’d never really known
suffering. I’d dressed up in their
charisma like I was putting on
borrowed clothes. And I’d walked
away from Zara, who’d been my
friend.... I should have stayed; I
should have followed the higher
impulse, the real life.What he should have done was be
born in a Sally Rooney novel. What-
ever the failings of her millennial char-
acters, and even when they assert that,
given all the suffering in the world, the
work they do is “morally and politically
worthless,” Rooney deems them de-
serving of a rosy future. As one char-
acter in Beautiful World tells another,
apparently in all seriousness, if people
are too busy paying attention to their
friends to do “more important things”
such as preventing the human species
from dying out, “isn’t it in a way a nice
reason to die out, the nicest reason you
can imagine?... Because we loved each
other too much and found each other
too interesting.” Isn’t it in a way pretty
to think so?
Looking back, what Luca sees as his
betrayal of Zara is still, to his mind, the
worst thing he has ever done. And yet,
at the same time, he calls the summer
of 2017—in hindsight as well as when it
was actually unfolding, and despite the
high price to be exacted—“the happi-
est time of my whole life.”
If a person repents sincerely, as Luca
does, shouldn’t there be a possibility
for atonement? Or is giving up all his
youthful hopes and dreams meant to
be that atonement? If he hates himself
for not having taken the higher road
back then, why can’t he learn from the
past and seek that road later? One of
the privileges of living in a privileged
society is the freedom to do the right
thing. “I wanted to do something
good,” he tells us, and to that end he
commits himself to a graduate teaching
program that will lead to employment
in an underserved high school. But we
know how that turns out: not so much a
chance for redemption as an enduring
punishment.
It wasn’t always clear to me what
Hoby wanted me to feel about Luca,
though I could imagine many readers
concluding that he had indeed earned
his life of quiet desperation. But for me
to do that I would first have to erase
from memory a great swath of my own
early twenties with all their sins and
follies, all those instances of vanity and
pretentiousness, phoniness and hypoc-
risy, the times when I too was seduced
by movie stars and forsook truer friends
to go follow them, that shameful age of
bad choices and shallow wants and stu-
pid, stupid mistakes, the many times I
seized the flower and left the fruit—not
to mention my envy of other people’s
book deals.
In fact, Luca’s present middling exis-
tence seems to me at odds with the per-
son we’ve come to know. We’ve seen
that exceptional people as different
from one another as Zara and Paula and
Jason saw in him someone worthy of
friendship, and though he might often
strike the reader as unlikable and even
at times repugnant, he is never less than
interesting company. Hoby has blessed
him with psychological acuity and a
Nabokovian eye for beauty and passion
for detail. Forever tormented by fears
of being a fraud, he turns out to be the
novel’s most authentic and sympathetic
character. For me, he is too intelligent,
too curious, too sensitive to be doomed
to eternal dullness.
It’s a tribute to his creator, of course,
that I go on like this, and that I care.
But seriously, the man is only thirty-
four. Still young. Surely still tall, likely
still handsome, even if now “mostly
sexless and a little fat.” And he’s funny,
too. QHermione Hoby, Boulder, Colorado, 2021Matthew DeFeoNuenz 78 79 .indd 79 11 / 18 / 21 12 : 02 PM