78 The New York ReviewBut I Was Young and Foolish
Sigrid NunezVirtue
by Hermione Hoby.
Riverhead, 307 pp., $27.00Luca Lewis, the narrator of Virtue,
Hermione Hoby’s second novel, speaks
to us from seven years hence. Despite
mention that the world has by then suf-
fered not one but two major pandem-
ics, 2028 doesn’t feel much different
from 2021. But Virtue, a retrospec-
tive millennial coming- of- age story, is
about Luca’s life more than a decade
earlier, when he was twenty- three. He
lets on that the person he is today was
formed by the experiences he is telling
us about, and from his tone alone it is
clear that his present self is an unhappy
one, burdened with shame and regret.
At one point Luca looks far beyond
2028 to imagine himself in his final
hours, in a hospital bed, remembering
a particular moment from the summer
of 2017:not knowing then that soon a mid-
dling marriage would go by in an
instant, two boys would be born
and leave home before you knew
it, before you knew them, and that
you’d teach at the same Philadel-
phia high school for what felt like
forever in its drudgery and like
an instant in terms of what was
gained.Not that such discontent was inevitable.
Luca can also imagine his dying self
thinking back to another day in 2017,
when it was still a time “of everything
being possible because nothing bad had
happened yet.” Virtue is a confessional
narrative in which Luca makes his own
case for how he blew it. He appears to
see a lack of fulfillment as just deserts
for mistakes made in his youth, for not
having been a good (or at least better)
man, and believes he has only himself
to blame. The reader is free to disagree
with him, and I do.
In 2016, when his story begins, Luca
is not sure exactly what he wants to
make of his life, but probably—ide-
ally—something artistic; in any case,
something far from his roots in Broom-
field, the drab Colorado town where
he grew up “an only child, a former
fat kid, son of a dental nurse named
Kimberly who ran an Etsy side hustle
making customized wedding- cake top-
pers out of modeling clay.” This kind of
description, thriftily capturing so much
in a single piquant phrase, is one of the
pleasures of Hoby’s writing. The mix
of funny- awful is also a hallmark. “My
mom’s life had been a landslide of dis-
appointments,” Luca tells us,chief among them my father’s
departure a few weeks after my
conception. Which is to say nine-
teen years before I too decided to
leave her in Broomfield, abdicating
any future responsibility for her
sadness.He attends Dartmouth, followed by a
year at Oxford, where, on the very first
day, he defamiliarizes Luke, the name
his mother gave him, to become Luca.
The guilt he feels for abandoning
Kimberly—and for his entrenched
snobbishness toward her—is more thana little mitigated by her politics. She is
a Fox News Loyalist. She has disdain
for the needy. She votes for Romney,
and worse. After Oxford, where he
picks up a posh accent, Luca ends up
in Manhattan, having landed, thanks
to the efforts of a fellow student who
composes Luca’s cover letter, a nine-
month internship at “a fancy American
literary magazine” that Luca has never
even read. In spite of the disadvantages
of his background, not to mention his
current existence as a lowly intern and
a tenant in a shared, crummy China-
town apartment, Luca admits to being
privileged: “Guilty until proven inno-
cent”—meaning, of course, never—“I
walked around cowed by my own cis-
white- maleness.” It is this that makes
his relationship with Zara McKing, the
magazine’s only Black intern, consis-
tently awkward. Much as he genuinely
likes Zara, and although she is recep-
tive to his friendship, Luca can’t find a
natural way to interact with her.
“I aspired to be drawn to her righ-
teousness, not just her beauty,” he re-
calls. When they are together he can
never forget that he is in the presence
of a superior being:I wondered how being Black and
female had enhanced whatever
windfall of intelligence Zara had
already been granted at birth....
Was it that women, especially
Black women, attained greater
insight into life through their en-
counters with oppression, and this
made them smarter?The magazine for which Luca and
Zara work has the silly name The New
Old World and is autocratically edited
by an aging, boozy patrician named
Byron Tancread. In his blowhardish
description: “We have always posi-
tioned ourselves beyond politics....
That is our legacy. That we endure.
That we are not buffeted by... the zeit-
geist and so forth.” Throughout its long
and venerable existence at the center of
American letters, The New Old World
has published scores of celebrated writ-ers, almost none of whom have been
women or people of color.
With the crisis of Trump’s election,
as “a civic duty of sorts” Tancread al-
lows The New Old World’s offices to
host meetings in which concerned staff
and friends of the magazine can discuss
what might be done—meetings out of
which no meaningful or efficacious re-
sults ever come. At a regular staff meet-
ing, Zara’s suggestions that they invite
“some smart writers, mostly writers of
color” to contribute essays about such
urgent issues as systemic racism, in-
come inequality, and the climate crisis;
that they reprint a famous James Bald-
win interview in which he addressed
America’s racism with bracingly blunt
honesty; that rather than putting out, as
planned, “a roundtable on resistance”
they actually, for a change, “do resis-
tance” are met with a mixture of shock,
evasiveness, and excruciating discom-
fort. (Part of this response, it should be
said, has to do with Zara’s provocative
repeated use of the n- word.)
After Trump’s inauguration, Luca
participates in his first- ever protest
march, in Union Square. But though he
sets out that day “with a new and thrill-
ing sensation of purpose,” his zeal soon
dips into melancholy. “Here among so
many good, committed people, with
their placards and pink hats and indig-
nation, all so brilliantly sure of what
they wanted to say,” Luca does not be-
long. His protest is as fake as his British
accent, his Italian name, the letter that
helped get him his internship. In other
parts of the book, he admits to being “a
fair- weather virtue guy” and ruefully
mocks his kind: “We had zero experi-
ence or understanding of what prac-
tical politics meant. We didn’t know
what we were doing. We felt bad and we
wanted to feel good, and that was all.”
For people like “us,” activism is largely
performative—nothing like the life-
and- death matter it is for someone like
Zara. Luca will never shake the feeling
that, like white Americans everywhere,
he is a fraud.
Had he managed to form a tighter
bond with Zara, it is implied, had he
allowed himself to be led and educatedby her, he might have found a way to
contribute seriously to the cause of ra-
cial and social justice and to making a
better world. But now a mighty tempta-
tion beckons him down a different path.Enter Paula Summers and Jason
Frank, a married couple who befriend
Luca and whom he remembers all these
years later as “my twin movie stars who
for a moment were truly nothing less
than my life.” She is an artist who has
done some covers for The New Old
World; he makes documentary mov-
ies. In mid- career, each has achieved
the kind of success that means being
interviewed by Charlie Rose and pro-
filed in the arts section of The New
York Times. But it’s inherited family
money—hers—that makes them rich.
As it turns out, for Luca, the best thing
about being at the Union Square march
is running into Paula, whom he’d already
met briefly at the office, and receiving an
invitation to one of the couple’s regular
Sunday dinner parties. Their house, in
Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill, with its artfully
arranged rooms filled with beautiful ob-
jects, takes his breath away. The sumptu-
ous spread gives Hoby a chance for some
extravagance of her own:There were ranks of Barolo on the
table lined up like bowling pins and
enormous bowls of pasta, a menhir
of aged and crystalline Parmesan,
heaps of salad slick with oil and
lemon juice and sparkling with
flakes of salt, and Jason’s warm,
crusty sourdough passed around
and torn hand to hand into sops
for the olive oil arrayed in little
ceramic dishes, and then plump
round clementines still wearing
plumage of improbably green
leaves—tiny fat fruits sending up
bursts of juice vapor as finger-
nails scored their pliant rinds....
After the clementines came wal-
nuts to be cracked, leaving min-
iature shipwrecks of shells across
the white tablecloth, plus shards
of dark chocolate to be snapped in
thin gold foil and, finally, earthen-
ware cups of espresso spumed with
a thin surf of ochre.It may be in part because just be-
fore reading Virtue I’d read Beautiful
World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney’s
latest novel, written in her deliberately
parched, matter- of- fact style, that I
took such delight in Hoby’s prose. She
isn’t afraid to reach for a word like men-
hir to describe a hunk of cheese. Else-
where, the smell of coffee is “cloistral,”
a large spoon is “rouletted” around a
pot, and a teenage girl is “recklessly
freckled.” Cooking, Jason wears a dish-
cloth over his shoulder “chefily.” When
Paula says something insincere, it’s
“with a smile like a cheap and flimsy
dress half slipped off its hanger.”
More than twice Luca’s age, Paula
and Jason are vibrant and sexually at-
tractive in the manner of those who
can afford to maintain a high level of
self- care. Luca declares himself baffled
as to what his appeal to this glamorous
pair might be but guesses it may have to
do with his being not just young but tall
and handsome and having “a curiouslyGeoff McFetridge: Rise of the Tool Makers, 2021Geoff McFetridgeNuenz 78 79 .indd 78 11 / 18 / 21 12 : 02 PM