‘Neon in Daylight’ Lights Up Ambivalence With Shades of Didion and Others

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In recent years, headless animals have turned up with disconcerting frequency in New York City parks — goats mainly, but also chickens, and on occasion, a pig or calf. Religious sacrifices, speculate the optimistic. Psychopaths, mutters everyone else.

It’s proof that we’re catching the characters in “Neon in Daylight,” a radiant first novel by Hermione Hoby, at an odd moment that they’re not more puzzled by this development — even when they find themselves tripping over the carcasses.

After all, there’s an eerie electricity in the air. The novel is set in New York in 2012, in the waning days of summer. Hurricane Sandy is about to unleash itself on the city. Everyone seems to be losing his or her head.

Kate, a British Ph.D. student, has washed up in New York to get away from her boyfriend, the dismal, thinly drawn George, and allows herself to be steered into all kinds of interesting trouble. Inez, a mouthy, beautiful teenager, has grown bored of selling Adderall to N.Y.U. students and is meeting men online and catering to their extremely specific sexual fantasies. We meet her father, Bill, a once lauded and now sodden novelist, passed out in a public park.

The three form a torpid triangle for a time (Kate befriends Inez and has an affair with Bill, without knowing Inez is his daughter), propelled less by desire than by a desire for desire; for any kind of strong feeling, really.

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“Porn now was a kind of heartache,” Hoby writes of Bill. “He’d click in a joyless trance, in the hope that some body, any body, would wake him up.” Kate rouses him, but only slightly — what the characters want from each other or for themselves feels remote, not because they are inaccessible to us but because they are inaccessible to themselves.

This is a common kind of character these days — a woman, more usually than not, who doesn’t know how or what to want. She is Reno, Rachel Kushner’s splendidly vacant heroine from “The Flamethrowers,” and Leah, from Zadie Smith’s “NW.” She is any number of Catherine Lacey’s or Alexandra Kleeman’s stymied women. “I don’t even know what I want,” the character Marnie says on the show “Girls.” “It’s O.K. to want things,” Bill reassures Kate in “Neon in Daylight.” This preoccupation with exploring uncertainty and ambivalence through the passive personality of a woman (and one usually surrounded by men with very defined desires and ambitions) has antecedents in the great novels of the 1970s: Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays” (Inez’s name gestures to the Didion-like character in “Democracy”); a celebrated body of American fiction full of listless women and precise prose.

And precision — of observation, of language — is Hoby’s gift. Her sentences are sleek and tailored. Language molds snugly to thought.

Story isn’t her interest — or her forte. The foreshadowing can be heavy-handed, and I’m agnostic about the book’s climax, which cribs from Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours.” Her talent is for evoking mood. The title comes from one of Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” (“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure”), his collection of odes to New York, a great dispensary of pleasure and strangeness. Hoby shares O’Hara’s keen eye for the city’s grubby beauty, for how, as she writes, “a low-slung sun burned all the day’s dirt into gold,” for its hum and heat and clatter. On her first day in the city, Kate is woken from a nap by the din of a nearby restaurant reaching her third-floor apartment: “The sounds she woke to were so rude and immediate that it seemed as though all the sidewalk tables of the cafe had levitated — that the whole tableau of chairs, plates, glasses were suspended right outside this window, with freshly showered men and women dining while their feet dangled happily in the air.”

Summer creeps into fall. Kate grows closer to Inez and Bill even as her departure date nears. Details gradually begin to rhyme and repeat. One chapter ends with Inez holding her foot; the next opens with Bill in a similar pose. A wine stain on a tablecloth prefigures a bloody bedsheet; teenagers twirling around subway poles are echoed by strippers in a later scene. Characters flinch from contact in identical ways and, at key points, find themselves significantly shoeless.

What to make of these consonances? We can see what these characters cannot. Their lives seem so particular, so painful and noisy to them. But under the city’s “merciless” skyline, in the wake of a hurricane, how similar they suddenly are, how small, how human. “In a sense we’re all winning,” goes another poem by O’Hara, “we’re alive.”