... intense and addictive ... With a touch as light as a single match, Hoby scorches the earth beneath hollow social activism and performative outrage among young, coastal liberals ... The novel is steeped throughout with Hoby’s penetrating observations on the moral underpinnings, absurdities and truths of contemporary social activism. The author is also just as much an artist, transforming words into stunning visuals ... When we engage in social activism, are we less virtuous if we signal it? What is our motive for engaging in the first place? Virtue considers such questions, but is too smart a novel to answer them.

Virtue tells the story of a backwater innocent seduced and disillusioned by a glamorous cosmopolitan couple. It is an old story, and a good one ... [A] skillful, sharp second novel ... Hoby’s gift is a sensitivity to the language of a given moment, and she generously cedes her own striking way with a phrase to the demotic of her characters ... Anyone wishing for a precise distillation of the manners and preoccupations of the early twenty-first-century moneyed American urbanite could do worse than read this book.

Hoby captures a relatable desire to appear better than we are—to edit our lives for each of our surroundings ... Luca meets the artist Paula Summers, heir to a gin-made fortune, and her husband, documentary filmmaker Jason Frank ... Hoby fleshes out the complexity of their relationship skillfully with overheard conversations, brief moments, and fights that Luca can’t help but listen to. But it’s the other interns who are more intriguing characters ... This is Hoby’s greatest achievement in the novel: she captures the struggle to balance living online and being present, of sharing a moment or framing a memory for consumption. Virtue beautifully explores the temptation to define yourself by other people’s expectations, and the risks of losing yourself in relationships where you don’t belong.

Although the manner in which Zara reaches for extremes in her arguments may lead readers to ultimately understand her as a symbol rather than a well-rounded character, her views on the purpose and utility of art represent legitimate ongoing debates borne of Trump-era cultural resistance ... Although the book’s ultimate position on this is unclear, the experiences of art in Virtue that inspire direct political engagement are extolled, while the more personal and aesthetic experiences of art represented in the novel are obliquely mocked — and worse, sometimes categorized as immoral. By letting one of the more interesting strands of the novel fizzle out, Hoby undercuts the nuance of what is otherwise a complex and insightful representation of millennial life.

Luca’s search for meaning, identity, and a palatable version of adulthood is bleak and unrelenting, raising the question of what happiness is possible––or deserved––in a world full of injustice and violence. Hoby allows Luca his unforgiving regrets and offers little in the way of redemption. Though acceptance and even contentment are possible for Luca, time isn’t enough to dim the worst of his youthful mistakes.

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 ... I took such delight in Hoby’s prose. She isn’t afraid to reach for a word like menhir to describe a hunk of cheese ... 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 viscerally—down to how their pillows smell in the morning. Zara—beautiful, righteous, 'conspicuously' smarter than all four of the magazine’s other interns (and seemingly everyone else), a woman of spotless integrity and heroic guts—is less an individual than a collection of merits ... Given our national historical moment, 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 hagiographic vision of Zara diminished her reality, and his bitter disillusionment and obsessive self-blame for 'all the ways I’d failed her' seem to partake of a similar exaggeration ... Luca’s present middling existence seems to me at odds with the person 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.

Luca's...inevitable crash back to Earth is rife with consequences that won’t fully unravel for years to come. In her second book, a delicious meditation on morality, nostalgia, and art, Hoby...searingly renders Luca’s many worlds and lambasts insincere compassion with nuance.

Hoby...delivers an accomplished take on class and protests against racial injustice ... Hoby’s writing sparks with inventiveness...and she offers insights on the damage of power imbalances in relationships. This speaks volumes on the shallowness of white privilege.

Hoby returns to a favorite subject: unmoored young New Yorkers enmeshed in other people’s lives ... it is only when tragedy strikes back in New York that the spell is broken and Luca is left to reckon with himself—and choices he hadn’t realized he was making. A small book about small things that becomes a big book about everything.