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Jo Hamya’s first novel Three Rooms (2021) was a buzzy debut about work, housing, and women’s ambition that tackled contemporary hot-potato topics including race, class, privilege and inequality. Her second, The Hypocrite, examines an excruciating father-daughter tussle playing out on stage and confirms her as a fine chronicler of modern anxieties. I have rarely underlined so many passages in a book.
Sophia’s father is a successful but controversial writer, a Martin Amis type writing “stylish degradation” and controversial opinion pieces. As Hamya’s story begins, he is taking his seat for a matinee performance of her play, while she is in a rooftop restaurant with her mother (his ex-wife), fretting about what he will make of it.
Sophia’s play is a “comedy of manners” based on a holiday with him in the Aeolian Islands near Sicily a decade previously, when she was 17. On that trip – which we also glimpse through short chapters of Sophia’s memories interspersed throughout – she typed as her father dictated a novel about the failures of the sexual revolution. He also encouraged her to go on ill-fated excursions with the cleaner’s son, while he had his own adventures picking up women in bars and bringing them home to sleep with.
Ten years on, Sophia enacts her revenge, putting imagined versions of her father’s sexual encounters alongside discussions about his novel onstage, juxtaposing his behaviour and his pompous literary ideas for audiences to laugh at. Watching in the stalls, her father feels like he’s been “Me Too’d”: reduced and reframed as a man who “fucked like a pig and wrote like a dictator”.
This set-up offers plenty of brutal revelations. There is the agony of a parent watching their child’s depiction of their sex life: “Sophia is aware he has a dick,” thinks her father – although the thought that she might be more talented than him seems to be the real kicker.
The father-daughter relationship is a smart way to pit different generations against each other, layering in complicated feelings of love, a desire for recognition, fear, and regret among wider cultural frictions. And of course, they’re more similar than they realise: both are accused of selfish thoughtlessness by Sophia’s mother; both cry, with shame, in toilet cubicles; both up their careers by being deliberately provocative.
Hamya’s writing is tightly wound, and continually constricting: no one escapes her judgement. There is empathy amid the cool critique – Sophia’s father has recently fallen apart from loneliness in the pandemic, and Sophia suffers humiliations on holiday that’ll make anyone who’s ever been 17 want to curl up and die. But all the characters are also revealed to have their own hypocrisies, and a powerful sense of self-righteous victimhood.
In the interval, Sophia’s father talks to a young audience member and cultural critic – and Hamya is just as merciless towards her right-on po-facedness. She loathes the play for being “smug, obvious white feminism … social justice for the upper middle class”. I have some reservations about this mouthpiece-like character, who seems almost a device for Hamya to anticipate criticism that she herself is shooting fish in a barrel by writing about such monied, entitled protagonists. Still, there is sly cleverness in having the father pick apart her argument that Sophia is too privileged to deserve a voice.
In fact, some of the sharpest passages are given to Sophia’s father: he despairs at the performance of a homogenised moral purity on social media, and the bad-faith presumptions of online discourse. “How is it possible to achieve the already difficult goal of being constantly virtuous in an environment determined to see the bad in everything as a means to progress?”
From curtain up, The Hypocrite offers forensic and pitiless insights into an embodied generation gap – everyone believing they’re in the right; everyone, of course, still getting things wrong. So who is the hypocrite of the title? Oh, probably all of them.
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 25 April, £18.99
