A review by bjr2022
Stay Up with Hugo Best by Erin Somers

4.0

If you've ever free-fallen into an experience, knowing there was probably nothing good to come from it, but it arose and you said "What the hey, you never know"—and the whole time you were rolling with it, you knew it was stupid, and you assumed intimacy that felt natural but had no roots, you may enjoy this book. If you've ever been close with somebody who was or later became famous, but you know how he is in real life, you will be interested in this book. If you've worked with comedians, you will find much to resonate with. And if you've suffered from being a professional wait-er—as in: one who waits for other people to do something so that you can do something—this book is for you.

Twenty-nine-year-old world-weary June Bloom loses her TV writers' assistant job when the comedy show, Stay Up with Hugo Best, fires Hugo Best, and she accepts a weekend invitation to his house in tony Greenwich, Connecticut. What makes the story rich is the self-awareness of June and Hugo, and the overall wisdom of author Erin Somers.

This is a well-written literary novel about a slick subject, but the author's wisdom makes it anything but slick. I really enjoyed it right up until the preamble to the ending,

Spoiler

which although realistic—transactional sex with a famous person (and I've known plenty of women who have acted like June Bloom did), made me kind of sick. I could also see a character with June's level of self-awareness, along with a pretty easy childhood (no trauma to twist her up), coming to her senses during a conversation with a fellow unemployed writer from the show about his (the writer's) assumption that she was going to have sex with 68-year-old Hugo for payback. It could have shocked her out of her "amorphous and existential" problems, leading to a completely different preamble, where instead of giving the famous Hugo Best a blow job, she ends up comforting him like a mother—marking the beginning of a new level of maturity for her with a man who will never grow up. All the rest could have followed as written, and the protagonist would have experienced a change/growth.

But it's not what the very talented Erin Somers chose, and it's her book.