A famous talk show host invites a lowly staffer to his mansion for a weekend getaway.
In Erin Somers’ debut novel, “Stay Up With Hugo Best,” lifelong fantasy collides with three days of eye-opening reality that illustrates the complicated truth of sexual politics while also serving as a thoroughly modern tale of the search for adulthood.
Confident and insightful, Somers’ book is, in short, an admonition to be careful what you wish for.
Scribner ($26).
It is Memorial Day weekend, and 29-year-old June Bloom has just lost her job. After working as a writer’s assistant on “Stay Up With Hugo Best” — a long-running late night talk show that she’s watched for most of her life — her dream is cut short when Hugo retires from the show.
Disheartened and pessimistic, she leaves the staff’s farewell party early; to her surprise, though, her newly minted ex-boss extends an invitation for June to spend the holiday weekend with him at his home in Connecticut.
Perfectly aware of the 65-year-old Hugo’s reputation as a womanizer, she impulsively accepts, knowing that the offer is likely based around the promise of a sexual encounter.
Yet, with unemployment and aimlessness ahead of her, she seizes the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime experience with her childhood crush.
Once the pair arrive in Connecticut, the weekend plays out quite differently from how June expected.
Instead of sexually charged interactions with Hugo, she finds herself in the midst of his own reckoning with post-fame life.
Caught between admiration for Hugo’s wealth and talent, and pity for his isolated existence, June is forced to acknowledge that the comedian she has admired for decades is just a regular person, albeit with outsize ups and downs inaccessible to those without fame or wealth.
Somers has written her protagonist with a sharp eye for the type of ennui endemic to a swath of the millennial generation.
Despite her parents’ well-meaning repeated exhortations to work hard in order to be successful, June has discovered that encouragement, effort and belief in one’s self don’t necessarily result in happiness, success, or even health insurance.
“I had been provided for,” June thinks to herself. “I hadn’t been harmed or held back, I hadn’t been scarred, but I had quietly failed anyway.”
She is one of many who follow their dreams, only to find those dreams are too expensive, too unrealistic, or don’t give them any real sense of satisfaction or purpose.
The true pathos of the book, though, is June’s slow realization of Hugo’s humanity. Before their weekend together, her understanding of him was based around his television show, his memoir, and gossip gathered on set. Mistaking information for understanding, she had agreed to spend the weekend with Hugo Best, TV host; by the end of the weekend, however, their shared moments of intimacy reveal to her that Hugo is more than just her image of him.
Much like June herself, Hugo is at a crossroads, beset by regret and fear of the unknown future. A sex scandal, long past, is still the first thing interviewers ask him about; two of his children no longer speak to him; colleagues dependent on his talk show disappear as swiftly as the show itself.
Hugo shouldn’t necessarily be an object of pity, but he now sees a life without an audience stretching ahead of him, where he is left to rebuild himself outside of the fame that had previously allowed him to indulge his worst impulses while reveling in the adoration of strangers.
At the end of the weekend, June understands that while so much of her life is ahead of her, Hugo’s life as he knew it has ended — an unenviable position that puts her own fears into perspective.
“Stay Up With Hugo Best” looks at dissatisfaction and loneliness, and how money and fame do not necessarily stave off those uncomfortable feelings.
It’s also a cynically funny look at the lies people tell to themselves or each other, whether it’s to further one’s career, seduce someone, or even just get out of bed on gray mornings.
Somers’ deft handling of the juxtaposition between self-defeating pessimism and the heartfelt need for human connection would be impressive for any established author; for a debut, it’s a tantalizing promise of incisive works to come.
Wendeline O. Wright is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (wendywright@gmail.com).
First Published: April 27, 2019, 2:00 p.m.