I came across The Hypocrite randomly and was intrigued firstly by the Sicilian setting and secondly by its premise of being a clash of generational perspectives.
I was also intrigued, having recently read Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, to discover another novel with a theatre setting. It is a thought provoking novel about the family dynamics of a daughter and her parents, played out one afternoon as she lunches with her mother, while her father watches the play downstairs. It is an awakening of sorts for them all.
A Daughter Creates
A young woman Sophia, has written a play. It is set in a summer holiday house on one of the Aeolian islands of Sicily, a place she spent a month with her father, typing his dictated novel, mostly hanging out alone, quietly observing the women he bedded nightly. That was 10 years ago.
The Father Watches
Today, her father, the (in)famous author, attends a matinee showing of his daughter’s work for the first time. He knows nothing about the play prior to being seated in the theatre. He swiftly realises that much of the set and characters are familiar to him. This might even be about him. About that holiday. He begins to feel uncomfortable.
No stories are entirely imaginary, cherub, he’d said then. Everything is always a little bit real. Sometimes you steal things from other stories and change them until they work how you like.
He wonders if the people sitting either side of him know who he is. He begins to prepare defences in his mind. He decides to interact with the young woman who had been seated next to him.
He thinks, I have never been any good at arguing. I have only ever said what is on my mind. So he asks her, without malice, whether she dislikes him because of what they’ve both watched; does his best to keep his breathing steady in the interval between his question and her answer.
Round Glasses is blunt. She disliked him before, she says. And the play is no great shakes.
The Mother Bitches
Upstairs in the theatre restaurant, the daughter dines with her mother. She spends most of the meal talking about her ex-husband. She has re-experienced living with him for a period during lockdown. Unaware, she begins to create a scene.
The narrative shifts between the father observing the play unfold, the daughter listening to the mother complain of him and that month long holiday in the past that inspired her to write the play.
In Sicily, Sophia had looked forward to spending the longest uninterrupted time with her father she had ever had. She did not realise that she would spend most of the time alone or in the company of Anto, the nephew of the woman who cleaned the house. Her father would be absent to her, except when dictating his chauvinistic novel. She would observe and learn things.
We Are all Products of Them and Ourselves
The novel explores the unmet expectations of each character in the family trio, their deafness to each other’s desire and the clash of generational perspectives.
The contradiction of the time had been the heightened moral obligation to consider other people as a means to keeping one’s own self-interest afloat. Showing other people care meant avoiding them.
The scenes pass in a kind of circumambulation, one after the other, progressing onward.
Revelation comes slowly to the father seeing himself from another’s perspective, through actor’s on a stage, where he cannot interrupt or change the narrative, he is forced to bear witness.
Held To Account, Punished and Portrayed
The mother is witnessed by both the daughter and the waiter, who forces her to account for her deteriorating behaviour. This is not the family home, no dsyfunction permitted.
The daughter equally will be challenged by a random stranger in a public place.
It is not quite a reckoning, but a challenge to each of them to see what they are not seeing, to pause from the habit of inflicting a perspective on others.
The novel puts on stage personal power, public perception and creative potential and asks it audience to consider the responsibility and ambiguity of creating art, mining lives and the sanctity or not (for art) of relationships.
So who is the hypocrite?
Everyone it seems.
Further Reading
The Guardian Review: The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya review – sharp generational shame game by Miriam Balanescu, 12 May, 2024
The Guardian Interview: Jo Hamya ‘Could I just write one massive grey area?’ by Hephzibah Anderson 20 Apr, 2024
Jo Hamya, Author
Jo Hamya was born in London. After living in Miami some years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a Masters in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. She has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler, edited manuscripts published by Edinburgh University Press and Doubleday UK.
She has written for the New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times. Currently, she works as an in-house writer and archivist for the Booker Prizes and its authors and is a PhD candidate at King’s College London.
Her debut novel was Three Rooms (2021). She lives in London.
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Word by Word 