As cerebral as she is, Kate is alive to influence and sensation, and her experience of the city is not logical but dreamlike and immersive, which Hoby depicts in image-filled language that’s arresting without being overwrought. There’s a kinetic New York magic that Hoby taps into ... They could be stock characters, but Hoby breathes life and nuance into them, in part by making them self-aware enough to know they are, to an extent, types, involved in some subtle, ongoing performance where they risk becoming parodies ... What initially reads like a wry, sharply pointed, if familiar, comedy of egocentric sophisticates gains depth and emotional magnitude as it goes.
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. Story isn’t her interest — or her forte. The foreshadowing can be heavy-handed, and I’m agnostic about the book’s climax ... Her talent is for evoking mood. The title comes from one of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems ('Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure'), his collection of odes to New York, a great dispensary of pleasure and strangeness. Hoby shares O’Hara’s keen eye for the city’s grubby beauty.
This type of thing would be unbelievable in the hands of a writer with less wit and linguistic power, but Hoby’s descriptive language is spectacular, like that of Elif Batuman with a freer spirit or Eve Babitz if she were writing about the opposite coast. It’s colloquial and verbose, clear and bizarre ... The force of her sentences is seismic, and they exude a massive confidence. The specificity of the writing creates clarity of character, which creates trust, and that trust is rewarded. Hoby’s control is never in doubt, and it makes the book irresistible ... Hoby is not interested in the mechanics required to make life in New York City possible for most people, and criticizing her on that front is akin to complaining that she didn’t write a different book ... Despite this, Neon in Daylight is luminous and wonderful. Hoby spins an intricate narrative that careens toward myriad social and emotional collisions. Her style has a delicious, raucous quality, and the way she weaves together her rotating perspectives keeps the book chugging along nicely. Her talent is clear, and her debut is a very good one.
I’m not the biggest fan of NYC, yet Hoby’s prose paints the spirit of the city without romance or praise. It breathes and moves on the page, but it doesn’t demand anything. Around every corner is a new discovery for Kate, and on every rooftop a view that doesn’t draw attention to itself. These monologues are some of the most radical and arresting moments of the novel ... Where the structure of the narrative feels predictable at times, it’s the observations from our outsider protagonist that livens up the prose ... Neon in Daylight is Hermione Hoby’s debut novel, and her skill on the sentence level — along with a keen eye for detail — will catapult her to stardom.
Highly propulsive reading. . . . With effortlessly fluid prose, Hoby, herself a New York transplant from London, excels most promisingly in depicting the vivid, perhaps most iconic American city, especially as seen through the eyes of a curious and perceptive newcomer.
...a smart, shimmering study of youthful self-discovery and the power of place ... There’s an extent to which any coming-of-age novel – any novel, full stop – set in New York City is treading ground already so mythologised, so narrativised, that it is impossible to make it feel real. Hoby nods to this ... while it resists narrative neatness, the book’s prose is impressively precise, glinting with pocketable images and insights.
Though Hoby relies on a well-trod conceit in mirroring Kate’s quest for self-actualization with her exploration of New York, her sharp distillations of the demands the city makes of people energize the book’s familiar beats ... This is a sharp novel with perceptive observations and vivid, complicated relationships.
Vivid as they are, both Bill and Inez never quite stop feeling like familiar sketches, types of people who never quite ascend to the status of individuals. Kate, meanwhile, rides their waves, a cypher, her distinguishing characteristic being her general lack of them. But Hoby is a master of atmosphere, and if the characters don’t stick, the vibrant loneliness of the city does. Energetic, if uneven.
