The Hop

May 15, 2022
Raised in poverty in rural New Zealand, Kate has a single mom with a steady stream of man friends and big dreams for Kate's future stardom. In high school, Kate and her best friend operate a sexual training program: they teach their peers how to fool around for money. In this work, Kate feels true power and makes enough to combat growing medical bills as Ma battles cancer. After Ma passes, Kate advances in her sex-work career and eventually lands in Nevada, where she works at the Hop, the most infamous brothel in the country. Here, she takes on a totally new persona: Lady Lane, the most popular and powerful bunny of all. Lady Lane's notoriety is Ma's ancient dream for fame come true, but now Kate must navigate entirely new powers: the power of her voice and the power of solidarity. Told in the alternating perspectives of the myriad people orbiting Kate/Lady Lane, Clarke's (Thin Girls, 2020) second novel is a gorgeously rendered and deeply engrossing snapshot of contemporary sex work.

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Starred review from June 6, 2022
Clarke (Thin Girls) tracks a poor New Zealander as she rises to stardom and becomes a symbol of the sex industry in this ambitious and addictive feminist tale. Growing up, Lady Lane (née Kate Burns) has to abide by one simple rule: whenever a “manfriend” of her mother, Merrill shows up at their house, she is to disappear. Still, Kate never judges Merrill because Kate, too, “underst the power of desire,” leading her to cofound the Sugar Club with her friend, in which they give paid kissing lessons to their classmates. This attempt at making money to help Merrill with expenses evolves and eventually prepares Kate for her gig as a stripper at a club and then for becoming a “bunny” at The Hop, a Moonlite BunnyRanch–inspired legal brothel in Nevada. Here, Kate (as Lady Lane) finds love, sisterhood, and fame as she starts to speak up about the decriminalization of sex work (“then maybe it would be made legal in the world, and then maybe there wouldn’t be so many girls working the streets and getting attacked and raped and murdered”). With a complicated mother-daughter relationship, unconditional friendships, disappointments, and a bold stance on the sex industry, Clarke’s novel consistently stirs the head and the heart. This is a great achievement. Agent: Susan Golomb, Writers House.

Starred review from June 15, 2022
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.

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