A wildly famous actor—known for rebooting forgotten films into global blockbusters—sets out to remake The Endless Summer with his ten-year-old son as his sidekick and muse, only to become entangled in a recursive spiral of identity, family myth, and cultural self-parody, with his daughter quietly pulling the strings.

SYNOPSIS:

Hamish Westfield is an über-celebrity—a shape-shifting actor-director who has built a billion-dollar empire by remaking forgotten films with absurd sincerity and uncanny success. At the height of his fame, he retreats to his modernist Hamptons compound for the summer, intending to remake The Endless Summer—this time starring his precocious ten-year-old son, Rabbit, as muse, intern, and conceptual sidekick.

Rabbit is whip-smart, sensitive, and obsessed with recursion: the idea that the end loops back to the beginning. Under his father’s tutelage, he becomes the summer's eager philosopher-prince, waxing surfboards and unraveling metaphysics while trying to decode his father’s layered personas. Meanwhile, Hamish’s teenage daughter, Hampton—socially elegant, tactically brilliant, and emotionally restrained—wields quiet power over a self-made teenage girl economy of favors, access, and status. She’s the unseen architect of the family’s myth, branding her own name into legend while playing everyone else like a long chess match.

The novel unfolds across recursive loops of beach rituals, helicopter landings, PayPal requests, private jets, poster iconography, and fragments of old Hollywood. As Hamish becomes entangled in his own cinematic performance, Rabbit begins to see through the mythos, seeking meaning not in his father’s shadows, but in the spaces between them. Hampton, ever three steps ahead, orchestrates her own legend with calculated grace. Their mother, Amanda, floats in and out like a spectral muse, omnipresent even in absence.

By summer’s end, what began as a light satire of fame and family myth deepens into a meditation on legacy, identity, and the stories we tell to hold ourselves together. Hampton & Rabbit is a recursive, character-rich exploration of modern myth-making—equal parts satire, family drama, and conceptual elegy—told in a rhythmically stylish voice that blurs the line between cinema and literature.