Most of Jo Hamya’s new novel, The Hypocrite, takes place during a single matinee performance of a play in the semi-locked-down London of August 2020. The playwright, Sophia, is in her late twenties. Her play is a success. While the show runs, she eats lunch at the theater’s rooftop restaurant with her increasingly drunk mother. The special occasion is what’s happening downstairs, where Sophia’s father, a famous British novelist, settles into the audience. When it begins, he discovers that his daughter’s play is about him. Its portrait, particularly of his views about and behavior toward women, is not kind.
Hamya, like Sophia, is a British writer in her late twenties. Her first novel, Three Rooms (2021), is about a young woman struggling to start adult life in a Brexiting Britain. It spans one year and begins at Oxford, where the unnamed narrator is a postdoc teaching assistant in English. She then moves to London, renting a sofa in a small apartment while working for a pittance at a London society magazine. She grows isolated as she puts off seeing friends because she has
no cash to spare; nowhere to host them…. I wanted to be able to invite them to a proper flat; to have four bottles of wine resting idly in their rack, and to pull them out in succession between a starter course, a main, dessert.
Much of the novel communicates her simultaneous anxiety about her own privilege and her yowls against the economic inequality and cultural elitism that exclude even her, a self-described “bourgeois” Oxford graduate, from the comfortable housing, pleasant lifestyle, and meaningful work that others appear to easily attain. Finally, she loses her job and returns, defeated, to her parents’ home in the suburbs.
Some reviewers called Three Rooms a polemical novel, apparently taking its narrator’s complaints as Hamya’s own social critique. I read the authorial perspective as far more ironic and tentative than the narrator’s. Hamya gives her narrator almost her own exact demographics: brown-skinned and well-educated, with the impassioned egalitarian political views one might expect from a young Internet addict. But the narrator also loses almost every argument she has outside her own head. Other characters, often older women, repeatedly chide her for her sense of entitlement and grievance, and she rarely makes a point without somehow looking foolish too.
When, for instance, the narrator breaks down at the apparent impossibility of ever having a home as beautiful as her roommate’s parents’ posh house, her roommate’s mother gently explains that she did not have anything like this when she was young and that, despite the lush illusions of social media, “most days are inexhaustibly dull and full of striving,” even for people who appear to have everything. Three Rooms plainly sympathizes with its narrator’s despair and disaffection, but Hamya seems to be suggesting that some of her most righteously held certainties might not hold up—and that some responsibility for her suffering lies within herself, rather than with social and political conditions alone.
The Hypocrite is a natural but significant development from Three Rooms. Both are fundamentally social novels in that they revolve around debates that occupy the public sphere: as Three Rooms focuses on inequalities of race and class, The Hypocrite focuses on gender and generational dynamics, as well as the ethical problems with using family as grist for the artistic mill. Both also reflect a belief that “dialectics create more intelligent arguments”—as a supervisor says when scolding Three Rooms’ narrator—than emphatic polemics. But The Hypocrite’s dialectical approach ditches the earlier novel’s occasionally cramped first-person narration (a self-conscious emulation of Rachel Cusk, whose influence Hamya has acknowledged) in favor of an agile and sympathetic third-person voice that floats through Sophia, her father, her mother, and a fourth, more wryly distant narrator’s perspective. The Hypocrite’s overall method—the tight frame around a single family in a single afternoon; the dense, rushing blend of physical and psychological detail; the abrupt leaps between contrasting interiorities and memories—draws in particular from Virginia Woolf, whose style Hamya has plainly studied and whose A Room of One’s Own provides Three Rooms’ epigraph.
At first glance, Sophia and her long-divorced parents seem to come from central casting, each with unsurprising views about gender, power, and the lines between appropriate and inappropriate conduct: Sophia sees privilege and exploitation everywhere, while her parents see her generation as needlessly fragile and hysterical. Sophia’s father, once a gleeful literary provocateur, longs for his “heyday,” when “his currency lay in caustically quotable remarks made over free drinks”—remarks that now, bafflingly, seem to have cost him more reputation than they ever earned. Sophia’s mother, acrid and wry about the slim payout of feminist progress and the disappointments of her own romantic life, maintains a stiff but well-liquored upper lip, dismissing Sophia’s structural critiques of patriarchy and references to “mental health.” When Sophia uses the word “depressed,” her mother corrects to “just down.”
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But Hamya’s insightful, specific descriptions complicate these familiar types and even render Sophia’s father a more vivid character than Sophia herself. In an early scene, Hamya offers a potent whiff of him, in an excellent mood, as he stops for a cigarette outside the Covent Garden theater. He sees a woman on the street “with her head bent and her thumb on her phone—such an ugly position, he finds.” He observes, perhaps ogles, the woman’s face, shoes, legs, hair, jewelry. Then, “as though she knows it would please him, she puts her phone in her pocket and tips her head back at the sky…. Who else could make her beautiful like this?” Communicating the simultaneously attentive and objectifying nature of his vision—as well as his lordly sense of himself as author of reality—the moment hints at everything we will come to learn about him as a novelist whose sexual politics have aged poorly and as a man whom culture and technology have triumphantly outpaced. Yet Hamya also shows his sensitive and deliberate manner as a father. As he reflects on his efforts to “give continuity” to his weekend-only role during Sophia’s adolescence, we learn that he used to supply her with “copies of books he was reading so that she could carry them in her bag and they might turn the same pages during weekdays.”
Inside the theater, his grand mood on this “benevolent day” begins to crack when the curtain rises to reveal a startling replica of a place he knows. He has deliberately avoided learning anything about the play—in order, he says to himself, “to preserve the chance of being pleasantly bowled over by his daughter’s talent.” Now he sees onstage the kitchen of a house in Sicily where he and Sophia stayed for a month during the summer she was seventeen—the longest period they had spent together since his divorce during her childhood. In Sicily, Sophia had acted as her father’s amanuensis, taking his dictation of the final draft of his latest novel. But there is no daughter in the play. The ladies who do the typing onstage are, instead, a series of women whom the older male novelist loudly and comically shtups, before or after he loudly and comically bores them with descriptions of his work.
The actor does not look like Sophia’s father, but his correspondence with the novelist in the audience is made unmistakable by a “purple paisley shirt” identical to one of his own. Like the set design, it is a detail that Sophia must have intended him to catch, a private gouging illegible to the general public. For the reader, this shirt accumulates meaning over the course of the novel. We first learn, from Sophia’s father as he watches the play, that he treasures this shirt, that “he never, to his memory, wore it to meet women—he loved it that much.” He feels violated by Sophia’s use of a sacred garment on the back of a vulgar simulacrum. We learn later from Sophia’s mother that she gave him that shirt when they first married, before Sophia was born. Finally, we discover that Sophia remembers seeing her father at a bar in Sicily, “red-faced in his purple shirt,” stroking the thigh of a brunette whom he later brings home and beds, less quietly than he thinks, while Sophia weeps in another room for reasons that both do and don’t have to do with her father. While he believes he refused to let this precious shirt abet his womanizing, Sophia’s memory suggests that his self-conception is sentimental and self-flattering, that he is not as noble as he imagines.
As the matinee progresses, Sophia’s father is whipped between the “pitiless” spirit of the play and the impressive quality of its construction. He feels betrayed and misapprehended, astonished that “the most important person in his life” has twisted a fond memory—of Italy, of the intimacy of bringing his daughter inside his writing process—into “an enactment of the criticisms that are levelled at his work.” At the same time, with a touching mix of pride and chagrin, he thinks: “She was better than him.” The play is “like the novel Sophia helped him write, but better,” deploying a “method he’d always wanted to use in a novel but had never worked out how.” He recognizes the homage in her choice to be a writer, and even in her choice of subject. But as the audience laughs ever more riotously at his expense—as the play’s method (like the method of The Hypocrite itself) emphasizes the chasm between how he sees himself and how he appears to others—he pleads internally for Sophia, for “someone,” to “show him grace.”
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Meanwhile, upstairs at the theater’s restaurant, the novel builds toward its countervailing reckoning: Sophia’s belated confrontation with what she has done. Sophia’s mother begins to tie one on, tormenting the waitstaff with demands for more wine as she recounts the first months of the pandemic, which she spent living in her ex-husband’s house. She resents that he came out ahead both in marriage (during which he wrote while she did the housework) and in divorce (after which he continued to write and grew wealthy while, at his own request, parenting only two days per week). Nonetheless, she tells Sophia, she went to keep her ex-husband company after an alarming phone call at the start of lockdown. Sophia’s father had been “barely coherent,” bursting into tears. “I was worried he was sad,” she tells her daughter, who is hearing about this incident for the first time. Sophia goes pallid as she realizes, too late, that her father—whatever else he might be—is a vulnerable creature that she is in the process of wounding.
Sophia’s mother, who read the play in advance, does not intend to defend Sophia to her father. “I thought we were going to have a nice lunch,” her mother sighs when told that he’s watching the play at that very moment. Sophia, simultaneously guilt-ridden and unwilling to concede that her father deserves compassion, launches into a lecture about enabling his selfish and toxic tendencies—a lecture whose off-the-rack criticisms Hamya cleverly signals by reducing them to summary: “Sophia says a number of cruel things to her mother in a calm tone of voice. She calls her an enabler. She calls her a coward. She tells her she has compromised her beliefs for comfort.” “You’re just like him,” her mother finally barks. “I tell you something you don’t like, and you bull your way through until I roll over. You just know what you want to do, and then you do it, without thinking of others.” (It is not the last time the novel highlights father-daughter similarities.)
Sophia repeatedly denies that she has done anything cruel because, she claims, the character in the play is not her father at all. No one she says this to believes her. After lunch, Sophia has a remote therapy appointment. She knows that her creative urge cannot be separated from a desire to emulate her father; that he has always cared for her and even now pays for her private health insurance (and therapy); that her play’s success derives in part from the gory spectacle of a daughter putting her famous dad in the dock. When she protests to her therapist that she “revised an entire play for months in consideration of his response,” changing it from a “blow-by-blow account” of Sicily to something less factual, she is finally forced to admit that it really is him in that purple shirt. The moment contains the haunting possibility, clear to the reader if not Sophia herself, that the alterations she made to distance her fiction from reality—a self-protective but also merciful impulse—are the very changes her father now perceives as distortions, misunderstandings, and caricature.
The furious Oedipal drive behind Sophia’s play derives from the misogyny she sees in his novels and his life, and from the concentrated dose of it she received during that month in Sicily, when Sophia first met her dad’s non-fatherly selves. She met his working self when she sat down to take dictation: he put a hand on her shoulder, signaling gratitude and parental pride, “but after that she had not been his daughter anymore. The voice that issued came sharp, and only half aware of her presence.” It jarred her to realize that he was capable of treating her like other people, like an employee. It also jarred her to witness his lascivious side, particularly because he didn’t know she was witnessing it.
We learn through flashbacks that the seventeen-year-old Sophia spent time that summer with a young man named Anto, the nephew of their house’s caretaker. Anto is a bit older, not handsome but confident and condescending—a distinctively Italianate chauvinist. He presses Sophia into sexual encounters that will still trouble her ten years later. But she also seeks his approval, in part by claiming that the novel she is working on during the day is actually her own. When Anto later visits the house, he tells Sophia’s father that she is “a very lovely little girl but I wouldn’t think to touch her,” and he mentions that he is impressed with what Sophia has told him about her book. Sophia’s father reveals who the actual novelist is, and he and Anto laugh, together, at her.
The London audience’s laughter is Sophia’s reversal of this boys’ club humiliation. Her father still does not understand the depth of her injury when, after a dramatic interruption of the matinee, father and daughter fumble toward each other to figure out whether their relationship can be salvaged. The mother—exiting the novel with the line, “Fucking artists”—heads to a spa.
The Hypocrite ticks out new information through brief, cinematic scenes that, though often spare, remain well tuned to the distinct voices of Sophia and her family throughout. The deft compression by which Hamya achieves this is sometimes a weakness, leading her to rush past potentially fruitful moments, particularly those that do not link directly to the questions of gender and art at the novel’s heart. Sophia’s mother, for instance—though she builds to a wrenching moment of “incandescent” bitterness in the theater’s restaurant—is portrayed mostly through her relationships with Sophia and Sophia’s father. We learn not quite enough about the nondomestic life Sophia’s mother leads, or would like to have led, outside of them.
The book’s flattest scene occurs when a young woman we know as Round Glasses, who sits near Sophia’s father in the audience, joins him for a cigarette during the show’s intermission. Round Glasses recognizes and bluntly criticizes him for making a living from offending people, for having proclaimed that “iced coffees are for pussies,” that “moral order in Europe…would be restored if women committed themselves to being homemakers,” and that “white men are experiencing racism within the publishing industry.” She also says Sophia’s play is “no great shakes,” just “smug, obvious white feminism.” He criticizes Round Glasses in turn for what he sees as her lack of compassion and her rote, humorless regurgitation of “fashionable words from The Guardian.” Their argument is so kludgy and off-balance (intentionally so? I wondered) that it seems almost an interlude from the novel itself. In this scene more than any other, Hamya seems to flinch from the otherwise gratifyingly large trust she places in the reader’s intelligence, in our ability to culturally contextualize Sophia’s family and their art.
There is something off in the final pages, too, which shift to the perspective of another character who, like Round Glasses, views the family from the outside. This is Elena, the Sicilian house’s caretaker and Anto’s aunt, whose verdict about Sophia and her father—“They were lazy, messy people, Elena decided”—echoes Nick Carraway’s in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” Three Rooms similarly shames its characters for indifference to those who clean their homes. But The Hypocrite’s final maneuver would have worked better if Elena had been as engaged with the story as Carraway is in East and West Egg before he sums them up. As a final judgment from afar, this last scene feels slightly defensive, like an apology for the novel Hamya has written and that we have just read.
This novel needs no apologies. The Hypocrite is wise about art and writing, tender about family and the bewildering march of time, and smart about the ways cultural conflicts touch individual lives. At once ironic and humane, it trades most satisfyingly on tragedies and comedies of self-delusion—the truth that we all have the minority view of ourselves, particularly when it comes to our intentions—and the inevitability that we will get others even more wrong. In Three Rooms, a student, tellingly dismissed by the narrator, invokes Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Only the hypocrites, Hamya tells us, get to have it all.
