Reviewed by Jon Baskin
2.5.07

Jeff Hobbs’s The Tourists is a post-college tragedy. That is, it’s about the growing population of well-educated young men and women for whom life after graduation is a tragedy, like Hobbs’s 29 year-old narrator, a Yale educated “writer” struggling to pay his rent in New York’s East Village and haunted by an almost pathological nostalgia for his university days. Fittingly, the novel begins with an intimate memory from the narrator’s junior year, involving his then-future boyfriend Ethan Hoevel, and a Yale glamour couple, track star David Taylor and his beautiful girlfriend, Samona Ashley. David and Samona—“a new couple still in their beginning”—clasp hands and kiss on the lawn, while the narrator and Ethan (soon to begin a relationship of their own) look on, the narrator thinks, portentously, of how “the dim light from a hundred dorm room windows…can illuminate so clearly their ignorance of all the awful things to come.”

College, in this sense, represents the blind and hopeful beginning moment, “that dreamlike space,” as the (nameless) narrator calls it, where things still feel “intimate and exciting.” Here is how the narrator describes his time since that day on the quad:

Eight mostly uneventful years […] punctuated by four or five address changes, professional stasis, the beginnings and requisite endings of a few minor relationships, and—near the end—the onset of that lonely, latent kind of panic which accompanies the realization that you can no longer afford not to know where your life is heading.

The rest of the novel, like the opening, weaves back and forth between shimmering Yale and a jaded present-day Manhattan, where the other principles have arrived at a similar spot, even if they have achieved more external success. Ethan has made a name for himself as a designer, while David has scored a steady gig with an investment bank and wedded Samona, who has begun a clothing company. Yet all three look with trepidation towards the future and seem to lack the maturity to make adult decisions. David and Samona’s marriage is depicted as a Revolutionary Road style stalemate, while Ethan plays childish head games with his love interests and friends. The most destructive of these games turns out to be the lust-triangle he instigates with Samona and David. To the narrator, whose own role in the unfolding drama is uncertain, these developments are both disturbing and evocative. Ethan’s tryst with Samona especially brings back memories of his own painful crush (he kissed her once, at a party, in college), and triggers a number of nostalgic flashbacks to a time when things were simpler and less sordid.

Overall, Hobbs’s narration of the affairs is uneven. The cover of The Tourists advertises the fact that Hobbs was mentored by Brett Easton Ellis (replete with protagonists who waver cartoonishly between gay and straight, the plot will recall for readers Ellis’s excellent college melodrama, Rules of Attraction), but his sentences do not crackle like Ellis’s and he does not go as far with his characters. The Tourist’s narrator, a journalist, straddles a fine line between intriguingly enigmatic and frustratingly vague. Often inarticulate or evasive about his own motivations and desires, some readers will find themselves disinclined to delve into the mystery of why anything that happens matters to him.

These are not negligible demerits; what alone rescues The Tourists as a worthwhile and compelling read is Hobbs’s skillful enshrinement in his characters of the powerful nostalgia most evident in the narrator, and characteristic of a generation trained to view growing up as the ultimate horror. None of Hobbs’s main characters are 30 years old, yet all mourn their college days and their youths, when experience moved them and, as one of them remembers, “I didn’t know where I was heading and had no idea what would happen to any of us.” That growing up involves a foreshortening of options and requires commitment and hard work are verities they are reluctant, even terrified, to accept. It is principally to distract themselves from these things that Hobbs suggests they maintain themselves as “tourists,” who “keep moving and don’t stop to think.”

Hobbs is hardly the only recent writer to attempt to portray this particular milieu, affected by this particular nostalgia; what distinguishes his effort is his innocent (some would say too innocent) sympathy for his characters. It may be argued—it has been—that condescension is the appropriate attitude towards self-indulgent Ivy League grads carping about the end of their youth; on the other hand, perhaps the more audacious move is for a writer to take their concerns seriously. The Tourists is wiser about and more generous towards its Manhattanite Ivy Leaguers than Claire Messud’s highly acclaimed Emperor’s Children, published last summer, in which a triad of Brown grads trying to make a name for themselves in the Culture Industry are skewered as preening pseudo-intellectuals, worthy of our scorn but never our understanding. One of the best things that can be said for The Tourists is that Hobbs, unlike Messud, refrains from making easy fun of his characters. The jock investment banker, David Taylor, for instance, would make an easy target for ridicule, but Hobbs fills him in as earnest and conflicted, trapped in a job that supports Samona, even as it distracts him from his dream of becoming a high-school English teacher. The narrator, far from cutting the much-derided figure of the deluded artist, is privately past hope that he will ever do anything important and describes himself in public as “not really even a writer.” Ethan Hoevel is actually talented, and an artistic success (something that isn’t true of the characters in Messud’s novel), yet celebrity does little to heal old wounds.

More to the point, Hobbs takes seriously his characters’ own poignant sense of having “fallen off” since college, “the feeling,” articulated by the narrator near the end, “of being rooted in a particular moment that was gone; the feeling of existing in an opportunity that you’ve already missed.” Maybe this is indulgence, but it is to Hobbs’s credit that he resists undercutting such sentiments with derision or irony. For better or for worse, The Tourists takes the concerns of its characters as seriously as they do.