‘Tourists’ friendly

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 Angeleno 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 near the end of his 20s when his most famous novel was published.)

Bret Easton Ellis, the “American Psycho” author, mentored Hobbs and helped sharpen the novel, which comes out Tuesday. “There’s a wistfulness to it that’s missing from a lot of contemporary fiction by people in their 20s,” said Ellis, who settled back in L.A. last year after two decades spent mostly in New York. “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. The books I see from debut novelists aren’t anything like this -- they aren’t nearly this worldly.”

Hobbs’ great achievement, said Ariel Swartley, who gave the book an early 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,” said Swartley, who was drawn to the book initially for its treatment of a generation she hasn’t read much about.

“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 L.A. 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 teenager back home amid the mushroom farms of rural Delaware -- the kind of kid who would often disappear under a tree to read Lloyd Alexander’s fantasy novels.

A serious runner in college, Hobbs seems most comfortable viewing the world from a distance. He’s so polite that while discussing his work on a patio behind a dive bar in Los Feliz, he apologized for the day’s intense breeze. Some combination of shyness and Ivy League reserve seemed to keep him from making more than a few indirect comments about his novel. A lot of the book, he said, is just “the stuff you overhear on the street, between strangers.”

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.”

For someone who’s led a bit of a charmed life -- major-house book contract with little published writing, fruitful friendship with famous novelist, rave review in a glossy magazine -- his lack of arrogance is almost touching.

“I want to apologize to you in advance, actually,” he said, almost making eye contact, “because I sit in a room alone all day and mostly talk to my dog.”

That dog must be quite a sharpie, because “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.

Like his characters, Hobbs went to Yale. “I got really into the ‘Odyssey’ and the whole ‘search for the father’ and wrote my thesis on Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ the James Joyce book. Which now seems pretty silly,” he said. These days he admires writers such as Michael Chabon, Frederick Exley and Annie Proulx. He’s also a fan of Don DeLillo, and the book’s epigraph comes from DeLillo’s novel “The Names”: “To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operations of sound thought.”

Fruitful wanderings

The original spark for the book, Hobbs said, came from long walks and barroom conversations Hobbs had with his older brother, then living, like him, in lower Manhattan.

“We just wandered around, drinking a lot of beer and talking about heartbreaks and girls,” Hobbs said. “He’d just gotten out of a relationship and thought that the worst thing you can do in a relationship is to think you can change somebody. So the book came out of the fundamental question of whether you can.”

Most of the book takes place after graduation -- during, as one passage nicely puts it, “that lonely, latent kind of panic which accompanies the realization that you can no longer afford not to know where your life is headed” -- but floats back and forth in time as the characters’ back stories and relationships are gradually illuminated.

He wrote the book mostly while living in a 300-square-foot studio on Mulberry Street and working for the African Rainforest Conservancy.

Part of what’s catching reviewers’ eyes is a narrator who in the wrong hands would have been flat or dull but whose plight makes the book irresistible after the first few pages. We never know his name, he’s tangential to most of the action in the book, and he’s less obviously interesting than the golden-boy jock, the “exotic” half-Ghanaian beauty, and the gay furniture designer who become tangled, literally and otherwise, in one another’s lives. But he is appealingly quiet, reserved and observant.

Hobbs said that while he revised the book many times, the narrator never changed. “It was a pretty easy voice for me,” he said, “because I’m pretty withdrawn myself: I don’t like to leave my house very much.”

Ellis said that Hobbs’ shyness fits into the careful observation in his book. “You’re observing all the time, because you’re an exile, you’re an outsider. Writing a really good novel like that, I believe, comes from a lot of pain, a lot of stress, a lot of things you don’t like about the world.”

Ellis, who agreed to read the book as a favor to a mutual friend, was also struck by the way the book “had a lot of interesting things to say about that generation’s fluidity about sexuality, done in a way that’s so casual it’s jolting.” (Ellis, long assumed to be straight, came out as gay in 2005.)

But it’s not a book with any clear high-concept peg: Its characters move in a kind of sexualized haze, but it’s not about sexuality, entirely; it takes place in New York around the turn of the century, but the references to 9/11 are mostly glancing and indirect. Its characters are tourists, indeed, in time as well as space: The reader learns about the declaration of war in the Middle East only as it affects the narrator’s struggling freelance career.

“Maybe it comes from going to a school like Yale,” Hobbs said. “It really doesn’t get any more insular than that.”

Despite some contemporary tags -- a biracial siren, a shrugging acceptance of male bisexuality, e-mail messages reproduced the way letters were in Jane Austen -- the novel’s reflective tone and characters seem very old school.

“Those are my favorite books, the old-fashioned ones,” said Hobbs. “In contemporary literature there’s been a lot of razzle-dazzle verbiage.”

Bad first impressions

Almost two years back, the small production company his wife works for sent her to Los Angeles and the couple, married the day before, drove west. Hobbs hated L.A. at first but wouldn’t quite say why. As he put it: “We had this dinner the night we came in, there was an actor there, a producer.... It was just awful; you know what I’m talking about, I guess.”

There are also the smaller annoyances: “No one tells you to take Fountain when you move here. That might have changed my life considerably.”

It may be that Hobbs, at this point, is a bit of a tourist himself. He said he loves Runyon Canyon, but otherwise didn’t seem interested in talking about favorite restaurants, parts of town or the city’s bizarre, popped-out take on urbanism.

At the very least, L.A. doesn’t seem to have penetrated his unconscious yet: While he has vague plans to set a book in the Valley at some point, his next novel will be about a family of five sisters back East.

“I walk my dog for three hours a day, but I don’t really interact with this city,” he said. “There’s not much to see on the street because people drive. I think there’s a reason that not many novels are set in L.A. and almost every movie is. I find it a lot harder to figure this town out, atmospherically or socially.”

Manhattan’s moving tableau made a bigger impression on him. “You see so many details,” he said, “just walking to the bodega across the street. And those are the fundamental starting points of writing a place.”

Hobbs’ is not the kind of personality that makes a natural fit with Hollywood’s ego and machismo, but he might, in fact, have the right kind of talent. Swartley sees him as a natural for writing screenplays. “I just thought he had a handle on a generation” and with a combination of strong dialogue and great perceptiveness.

“Though I don’t,” she said, laughing, “want him to follow the Scott Fitzgerald path too far.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com