THE HOP

The author of Thin Girls (2020) turns from disordered eating to sex work in her second novel.

The novel opens with a Vogue features editor gushing about Lady Lane—about her hair, her skin, the way she moves—and complaining about the fact that Lady refuses to share any information at all about her past. She ends with the line: “There’s talk of a multimillion-dollar book deal on the table for Lady Lane’s biography, but no one can get her to agree to tell the whole story.” In the next line, Lady herself takes over the narration. Her first words are, “I’ll start from the beginning.” The tension between one sentence and the next is amusing, but it also hints at what’s to come. This is the “whole story.” It’s the story Lady chooses to tell about herself. But it’s also the stories that other people tell about her—and the fact that these stories are valuable currency is an inevitable product of her celebrity. Lady describes an impoverished childhood in New Zealand, the death of her loving but unreliable mother, and her decision to move to the United States to work as a Bunny in a legal brothel in Nevada. She recounts childhood crushes and how she began charging money for kisses as a girl. And she offers a look inside the sex industry. But there are other voices here, too, co-workers, friends, and other people who know her. Their stories add texture to Lady’s account, and they often contradict her memory of events or her sense of herself. The plot turns on her realization that, although she made the choice to work at The Hop, the brothel’s owner regards her as a commodity, essentially interchangeable with the woman she replaces. The choice to work for him is a one-time exchange; making this choice means giving him license to choose how he uses her. Liberating herself—and her fellow Bunnies—will require a full-scale revolution. Although the narrative ends with some of the trappings of a conventional happily-ever-after, they are hard-won, and Clarke refuses to turn this story into a morality play. Newly rich and famous, Lady doesn’t turn away from sex work. Instead, she uses her new freedom to imagine what sex work might look like if its practitioners were truly empowered and autonomous.

Like Clarke’s debut, this is technically adventurous, politically relevant, and emotionally engaging.