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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, May 8, 2007

'Tourists' author today's Fitzgerald?

 •  Summer bringing loads of great books

By Scott Timberg
Los Angeles Times

If F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone to Yale instead of Princeton, set his novel among precociously successful designers and financiers, with a struggling freelance journalist rather than a Midwestern bond dealer narrating, it might have turned out a bit like "The Tourists," a new novel by a 27-year-old Los Angeles transplant named Jeff Hobbs.

Those kinds of comparisons are too pat, of course, but nonetheless people are likening its author to the pride of St. Paul, Minn., and the book to "The Great Gatsby." (Fitzgerald was in his late 20s when his famous novel was published.)

Bret Easton Ellis, the "American Psycho" author, mentored Hobbs and helped sharpen the novel. "There's a wistfulness to it that's missing from a lot of contemporary fiction by people in their 20s," Ellis said. "And a sadness that seems very adult, as if Jeff has lived much longer than he actually has. I think that's why it feels like a throwback."

Hobbs' great achievement, said Ariel Swartley, who gave the book a shout-out in Los Angeles magazine, is his ability to be both "withering and compassionate" toward his characters.

"You have this wonderfully claustrophobic sense of being caught up in these people's lives," Swartley said. "They are rats in a trap in a way. He writes about an obnoxiously self-absorbed world in a way that almost makes you interested and sometimes — sometimes — sympathetic."

The subject of all of this excitement is a tall, sheepish, gracefully handsome guy who moved to Los Angeles the day after his wedding two years ago and now lives, quietly it would seem, with his wife in West Hollywood.

He was considered, he said, a "space cadet" as a teen back home amid the mushroom farms of rural Delaware — the kind of kid who would disappear under a tree to read Lloyd Alexander's fantasy novels.

As for writing a contemporary "Great Gatsby," Hobbs was taken aback. "Gatsby," he said, is "kind of a book about a bunch of murderers. But it's thought of as this tragic love story. ... I'm almost embarrassed by the comparison."

"The Tourists" sketches, with a light touch, characters who are almost chillingly familiar. A frat boy working in finance, a gay Southerner with indomitably misplaced confidence and a self-righteous, California-born ranter are almost immediately recognizable: They'll either make readers smile or bring back awful memories of the people they learned to put up with in college.