A Year with the Hoopers

by James Hoby

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0972980423
• ISBN13: 9780972980425
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Hesitation Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.5" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Hilarious and unique!

A box is thrown onto a lawn with random items packed in shredded paper. The shredded paper is reassembled by a software program and the results is a year of the Hooper's discarded letters, memos, emails, notes, receipts, lists, circled articles, and random writings. This produces a hilariously funny look at the lives of the Hoopers. Starting right off in January with a diary entry from young Jenny Hooper about her awful day taking flatulent Aunt Trudy to the doctor, to wild schemes by Mr. John Hooper to try to legalize child labor, strange letters written to Helen Hooper from an eccentric who insists he didn't see 'the accident' but did see a cat smoking a cigarette, a memo about a floor-licking employee, and many other odd moments in the Hoopers daily functions. Not only is this one of the most unique ideas for a book, but it is faultlessly delivered. The lineup is a random jumble of memos, emails, notes, etc, but chronologically in order for the year 2002. Humor abounds as we follow this dysfunctional family through the trials and tribulations of 2002. My favorite had to be daughter Jenny, dealing with Aunt Trudy's eccentricities and other students worshiping her at school. A close second would be Aunt Trudy's consistent changing of her last will and testament, including a plan to be buried in strawberry jam. If you're looking for a humorous break from the mundane everyday book, be sure to pick up this gem. The uniqueness and comedy of 'A Year With The Hoopers' stands out as a diamond in the rough. I look forward to more of James Hoby's work. Enjoy!

Cleverly offbeat

We all leave our paper trails. Bills, correspondence, periodicals, various notes: they all are an essential - if not always wanted - part of our lives. The papers do not make the person, of course, but they do provide some hints. In James Hoby's A Year With the Hoopers, we are given a look into one particular family based only on the papers they left behind. The premise is simple enough if rather strange: the writer happens upon a box of junk that uses shredded paper as packing material; he decides to reconstruct the shreds and what he comes up with are various bits and pieces of the lives of the Hooper family. The father, John Hooper works for an insurance company; the wife, Helen is self-employed, selling among other things, customized greeting cards. Their teenaged daughter, Jenny attends high school and Helen's aunt Trudy also lives with them. Through various letters and other materials, we get glimpses into the personalities of the characters. John seems to be something of a prankster, offering modest proposals to abolish child labor laws, but is also obsessed with true crime stories; at times he seems crazy, but at other times, his acts of insanity seem to be put-ons. Jenny is her father's daughter, with either a clever sense of rebellion or a delusional ailment. Trudy is the unpleasant permanent guest who imposes herself on the Hoopers; often ungrateful, she spends much of her time revising her will and filling it with strange requests. Helen is the most elusive, with very little that is obviously written by her outside of promotional materials; instead, we mostly get the other side of her correspondence with an eccentric potential witness to a car crash. Although technically a novel, A Year With the Hoopers has essentially no plot. Instead, it is a humorous chronicle of what went on with one particular family. The world of the Hoopers is not the real one but rather an absurd, parallel one where people behave in a manner that is amusing but also quite insane. The book reads more like a joke book, except the jokes are somehow all interconnected. I won't say it all works perfectly (like any humorous book, not every gag is a winner), but Hoby does get his fair share of hits. What I liked most about it was Hoby's clever approach to story-telling: it is like looking at things through a flawed, translucent piece of glass: you get a vague outline of what's going on, but you need to connect the dots yourself (to mix my metaphors) to get a full picture which may or may not be the real one. Based strictly on writing, this would merit four stars, but Hoby's offbeat style merits one more. If you like humor in your reading, this will fit the bill.

From banality to tedium and back again several times warmed over

Now that I've read this I have to figure out what to say about it. It is a work of fiction that is for sure. It is not a novel since there is no plot, although some of the vignettes are related in time and substance, such as Trudy Greathouse's continually updated Last Will and Testament. There is a kind of story in the letters from Xenophon Munny to Helen Hooper seeming to lead to some rising action. In fact taken by itself the Xenophon letters, with the final letter from Xenophon's mother, could constitute a short story somewhat in the manner of those found in literary magazines. The literary conceit and premise of the book is revealed in the introduction. James Hoby pretends to have found a box of somebody's trash dumped on his lawn. Mostly what's in the box is "a tremendous amount of shredded paper, which was used as packing material." He uses software and a couple of teenagers to read and re-compose the shreds of paper. Then he selects those covering "a year in the life of" from January to December 2002 and presents the pieces in chronological order. There are laundry lists, shopping lists, letters, things written on pieces of wallpaper (both sides usually), computer print outs, email print outs, corporate memos, greeting cards, plain old hand-written notes, postcards, articles or stories torn out of newspapers, etc. They all relate in one way or the other to the "Hooper" family. Some of the pieces are authored by John Hooper who is an insurance actuary and some are by his wife Helen, some by their daughter, some by friends and neighbors, and some by relatives. The opening piece is a shopping list in John Hooper's handwriting. The items on the list are intentionally commonplace, and despite the usual literary expectations, foreshadow nothing to come--well, except the banality of life itself. Next is a school essay by the daughter relating the unpleasant experience of accompanying her Aunt Trudy to her bi-weekly medical checkup. Jenny describes the aunt as "this immense, mummified, babbling, gas-bag of a woman." Included in the essay is this line: "If my mother sees me doing anything that isn't jaw-droppingly boring, all of a sudden I've got to start helping out." The "helping out" is in italics. In one sense this is a satire of middle America, of small town life and familia dysfunctions. The idea is that from a random collection of printed and written artifacts, somewhat like contemporary archeology, an understanding of the life and times of a family will emerge. However, Hoby's intent is comedic rather than scientific. I thought some of it was indeed laugh out loud funny, but most of it was tedious and intentionally insipid and absurd. This book reminds me a bit of the work of some comic artists like R. Crumb and "American Splendor." Where I think Hoby stands out is in his relentless pursuit of the purely banal. An example might be this greeting card from "Greathouse" in which a man is shown sitting in a steamy room.

A Fictional Assimilation of a Fictional Family - Or Is It?

James Hoby is a writer new to this reader, an artist who is a welcome discovery. Like some of our more controversial novelists of the time - Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Augusten Burroughs, Mark Haddon, etc - Hoby begins his witty diatribe about contemporary society's preoccupation with other people's privacy with a gimmick that works: Hoby tells us in his introduction that his idea for this book came 'in June 2005, when a large box was thrown from a passing van into my front yard. Inside the box, I found a grass-stained baseball, a torn pair of shorts, a blue-green vase, various other worthless items, and a tremendous amount of shredded paper, which was used as packing material.' He then states he obtained software for his computer and enlisted the help of two teenagers to scan the mess into his computer and then unscramble the contents, the body of the book being those assembled bits of information. Is this true or is this the beginning of a mad gossipy peek into the lives of one Hooper family? Does it matter? No. What follows is one of the most hilarious series of characters and interweaving stories that has appeared in print. At the same time, Hoby demonstrates his comedic genius in writing biting and intelligent satire, the likes of which few writers can imitate. Hoby's reconfigured shreds allow us to meet the insurance executive Mr. Hooper whose control over his business pries open a Pandora's box of corporate degeneracy; Mrs. Hooper whose automobile accident is followed by a supposed witness - one Xenophon Munny - who repeatedly sends bizarre letters demonstrating why he could not possibly have been a witness (including a side story of a massively obese woman upon whose death Munny must scatter a garbage can full of her cremated ashes over her beloved college with disastrous consequences); daughter Jenny who writes in a diary those incidents that establish her as philosopher of the misunderstood and abused youth, among whose duties is frequently transporting her farting funky Aunt Trudy to see a doctor who requires her presence and assistance for colon exams; the grand dame of the family Gertrude Greathouse whose constant changing of her last will and testament describes a twisted radical mind of the elderly. In addition to these unforgettably drawn characters the reconstructed papers contain original greeting cards of a macabre nature, pieces of wallpaper with wild tales of their own, pages from a book about a mass murderer of 82 college sorority girls, a literary preface to 'Jump for Joy' by Tennyson that contains some elegantly and eloquently beautiful writing, shopping lists, and a final invitation to the Hoopers to allow Jenny's participation in an experiment named the 'Reverse-Pinocchio Effect' - in which a creative child wishes to become a puppet. Whether the premise of how this book began is true or false matters little. The writing is sensationally fine, amazingly creative in concept, and reveals a talent

Very highly recommended among modern fiction and satirical works

A Year With The Hoopers is a hilarious collection of letters, lists, school essays, notes, greetings cards, e-mails, newspaper clippings, medical reports, legal instruments, journal entries, inscriptions and more as provided by John, Helen, and Jenny Hooper. Tactfully presented by Hoby, A Year With The Hoopers tells the tale of one man's discovery of a box having been thrown from a van which contains several random objects of little value, as well as an extensive supply of shredded paper as packing. A Year With The Hoopers is a collection of the scanned and re-assembled papers found in that box, and for its fun and inventive plot and story, A Year With The Hoopers is very highly recommended among modern fiction and satirical works.