The Hypocrite

(by Jo Hamya)

Sophia, who’s in her late twenties, is a playwright whose play is being performed in a theater in London. Her father, who’s a novelist in his early sixties who hasn’t published a book in a while, is at the theater for a matinee performance; he knows nothing of what the play is about. Meanwhile Sophia and her mother (who has read the play) are having lunch at the theater’s rooftop restaurant. The play, it turns out, has a male character who is very much like Sophia’s father; the set recreates the house in Sicily where they stayed when they were on vacation when Sophia was just about eighteen, and her dad was dictating his novel-in-progress to her to type. We get scenes from that vacation, and from the play; we get scenes of Sophia’s father watching the play and scenes of Sophia and her mother having lunch and talking about her mom’s lockdown experience (the performance of the play is happening in August 2020). (Sophia’s parents have been divorced since she was a kid, and Sophia’s mom ended up spending four months during lockdown living with Sophia’s dad.)

I really liked Hamya’s first novel, Three Rooms, when I read it a few years ago. I didn’t hate this one, but I didn’t like it quite as much, though that may be more about my reading tastes/what I was in the mood for than about the novel itself. I probably would have found a more linear narrative more satisfying to read, and family dramas aren’t always my favorite kind of novel. That said, I liked the writerly aspects of this book, both in terms of the prose itself (which is sometimes measured, sometimes very funny, and very good on the sentence level) and in terms of Sophia and her father both being writers—the way her father composes the events of his day into novelistic scenes in his head, the way the book considers storytelling and provocation and what stories we hear or want to hear from which people, and the way that when Sophia’s father feels humiliated, after watching the play, he thinks about writing a novel as a sort of rejoinder, which Sophia’s mother summarizes thus: “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?”