"A missive from the purgatory...Hope has the confessional, self-lacerating narrative style of Portnoy's Complaint>" -- The Times Literacy Supplement
"Infused with a caustic humor and a host of observations on freindship, pornography, and the moral malaise of a generation, Hope is this summer's essential first novel". -- (British) Esquire
Gabriel Jones could be your boyfriend, your husband, or even yourself -- he's an intelligent, charming, poetry-loving university graduate; he believes in love; he's capable of strong friendships -- and he's been seeing a gorgeous high-priced call girl who picked him up in a London cafe. He's also addicted to pornography. In fact, it's his attraction to pornography that causes the collapse of his relationship with the one woman he has ever loved.
Hope is a novel in the tradition of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Nabokov's Lolita, and Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground -- confessional novels that have at their centers a hyperintelligent protagonist who seductively draws the reader into an illicit world. Why would a young, attractive man, who has found the woman of his dreams, turn to pornography? Why do men in general turn to pornography? Welcome to the world of Hope.
By turns disarmingly intelligent, hilariously funny, and deeply disturbing, Hope examines Gabriel Jones's numerous obsessions; love and friendship; behavior he recognizes as both ridiculous and self-destructive; and mortality. It signals the remarkable debut of a highly talented young writer.
