The Hypocrite: A Novel

Written by Jo Hamya

Narrated by Claire Kinson

ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • DAKOTA JOHNSON’S TEATIME PICTURES SEPTEMBER BOOK CLUB PICK ● From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

“A sharp book, beautifully written.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Entitlement

"Excellent...I enjoyed the novel hugely...Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration."
—David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature

August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them. When the house lights dim however, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, has used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of the men of his generation.  

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593868546

Jo Hamya

JO HAMYA was born in London in 1997. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and edited manuscripts subsequently published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK. She has also written for the Financial Times.Three Rooms is her first novel. She lives in London.

Reviews for The Hypocrite

[novelcommentary · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Hypocrite was a topic of the New York Times book of view podcast, so peaked my interest when I heard of the premise. In the novel, a 27-year-old playwright by the name of Sophia has written a screenplay adopted to a stage presentation, one that’s going to be live streamed as well. Her father, a well-known sixtyish author of another generation, a bit of a misogynist, is anxious to come see his daughter’s play. He’s curious when someone says, “It’s very generous of him to come.” When the play begins the scenery reminds him of an extended vacation he took with his daughter 10 years ago on an island off of Sicily, where she helped him with his new novel, he dictating while she typed. When the play begins with the sound of an orgasm, and a discarded Paisley shirt that looks very much like his favorite, her father begins to realize that this play is about him. So that’s the set up, and it’s a good one.

Also interesting is that while this matinee is going on, Sophia is having lunch with her mother who it turns out had recently gone back to her ex-husband to help him through the pandemic, clean up after him, make him food, etc. She proceeds to drink her way through the lunch, the response of someone that has to be the buffer between these two artists. A subplot in the narrative reverts back to that vacation 10 years ago and what Sophia experienced sharing a house with a man who keeps bringing back strange women, and sets her up with an unpleasant dating experience.

The author writes well and does a masterful job with the interplay of the various scenes, all seemingly occurring at once. I’d be interested in reading her first novel and would look forward to seeing her future work. The New York Times podcast would be a recommended follow up to the reading as they discuss the more philosophical aspects of conversing through art and generational tropes.

Lines:

In a room full of cubicles, fake ficus plants on tiny desks are getting watered by garbage language conversations about theatre memberships and arts funding: evergreen to the tune of sustain the arts to sustain the future spoken by tired employees’ wilting mouths.

Sophia watches the impatience on her mother’s face shift slowly to boredom and thinks about something her father once said, that: the only thing missing from your mother’s otherwise perfect face is a beak. It’s a terrible sentence, made more terrible by the fact that he said it, and now, in moments like this, it will always live in her head.

Determined to give Sophia a thoughtful, and therefore original, ovation of her work, he avoids summaries of the show. He has come to it blind: he would like to preserve the chance of being pleasantly bowled over by his daughter’s talent.

This is a talent she has. By nothing more than setting down her bread and saying, Well? Sophia’s mother has made her daughter wish for an embolism.

Every-thing was sound, sound – the tide’s white noise rasping closer, then withdrawn, the maracas of pebbles being disturbed.

In fact, he asked me to agree that it was possible to feel unhappy or uncomfortable with a scenario despite having agreed to the conditions that enabled it.

We as people are so stupidly dull. There is never anything to stop our thoughts from destroying the beauty of something we fear may overwhelm us.

It is important for her, he knows, to tend to his wrongs. Often, he lets her. It helps her feel better. She hangs them like wet laundry on his bones. When they dry, she takes them down and replaces them with others. It is never very long before she has cycled through to the original load.

Ten years ago, you upset your daughter by writing a book she didn’t like. Ten years later she has upset you by writing a play you don’t like. And your solution to all of this now is to write another book. Yes?