The Hypocrite: A Novel

by Jo Hamya

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A tale of complex family mythologies and storytelling from a dazzling voice in fiction. This is perfect for fans of Anne Enright and Rumaan Alam.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593701034
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	18,613
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

JO HAMYA is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among others. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at King’s College London.

Editorial Reviews

06/03/2024

Hamya’s provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family’s fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia’s father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it’s about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia’s point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father’s misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage—in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where he is staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia’s father overhears a fellow audience member call the play “social justice for the upper middle class,” which prompts him to come to Sophia’s defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia’s father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of “companionship and coddling.” None of the characters escape Hamya’s bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren ought to take note. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Hypocrite

New York Times Book Review September Book Club Pick
Dakota Johnson’s TeaTime Pictures September Book Club Pick

One of the Best Books of August from The New York Times and The Week
A Most Anticipated Book from Town and Country, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and The Millions

"A brilliant litmus test of a novel...What Hamya brings to this modern debacle, besides a precision of language and an aptitude for structure that ought to make her contemporaries quake, is a tenderness you don’t see coming." 
—The Atlantic

“Sharp and agile…Hamya’s staging is savvy; each scene is packed with implication and, often, wit.”
—New York Times Book Review

"Impressive...[The Hypocrite's] pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters’ thoughts and the past and present...This is an intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play." 
—Wall Street Journal

“Hamya deploys a fluid prose style…What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya’s confident hands, it all becomes productively confused…When Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars.”
—Washington Post

"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

“The Hypocrite is a sharp book, beautifully written. Jo Hamya poses complex questions—about art and ethics, family life and sexual mores—and withholds from her reader any easy answers.”
—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

"Hamya’s complex and nuanced work invites both her characters and readers to ask questions that linger after the play’s third act."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Immaculate...A novel chalk full of wrongdoings, generational feuds, and rude awakenings, The Hypocrite is a story that will stick with you long after you put it down.”
—Chicago Review of Books

"In essence, this is a novel about a play about a novel. But really, it’s about so much more than that: father-daughter relationships, misogyny, generational differences, feminism, and more. Hamya makes it work."
—Ms. Magazine

“Witty and devastatingly acute.”
—The Guardian

“I was instantly pulled in by the ingenious structure of this novel…All the various strands braid into a fraught, compelling conversation, not just between parents and children, but between generations, and even between modes of art and understanding.”
—Lit Hub

“I have rarely underlined so many passages in a book…Hamya’s writing is tightly wound, and continually constricting: no one escapes her judgement. There is empathy amid the cool critique…But all the characters are also revealed to have their own hypocrisies, and a powerful sense of self-righteous victimhood…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.”
—iNews

“Lots of writers have tried to tackle the post-MeToo, post-‘woke’ landscape of interpersonal relationships, but this novel does it with more nuance than most…The Hypocrite elegantly shifts between points of view to reveal the blind spots of both of her characters.”
—Maris Kreizman, The Maris Review

"The layered narratives gradually create a collective moral clarity that transcends any individual perspective...I closed the novel with the strange feeling that the characters might have benefited from an experience only accessible to the reader—that of studying each other’s scripts on the same page."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“Acerbic…Hamya writes with real wit. Her descriptions are rich…Since the publication of her debut novel, Three Rooms, her style has rightly been compared to Rachel Cusk’s. With this original novel—sensitively observed and artfully paced—she breaks out into something of her own.”
—Literary Review

“Sharp, witty and astute about parents and children, but never cruel; I enjoyed it hugely.”
—David Nicholls, author of One Day

“Brilliant. Thrilling and unpredictable, it struck me as a story of misunderstanding and failed connection, told with a dreamy, Sofia Coppola-esque quality. As a portrayal of artistic creation fuelled by bitterness, The Hypocrite uncovers an uncomfortable truth: how a piece of art can both unify and alienate.”
—Natasha Brown, author of Assembly

“The Hypocrite is an acid chamber piece that skewers the father, mother and daughter at its heart without denying them their messy, affecting humanity. It’s tense, it’s painful, it’s funny. I loved it.”
—Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man

“A darkly comic family drama that keeps us guessing right up to the end…Hamya’s prose is crisp and fluid.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“The drama of the story’s intergenerational strife keeps us rapt on its own terms, but also functions as an even-handed cultural satire targeting social media-powered morality in the 21st century. Written with cool precision as well as barely veiled glee, it confirms Hamya as one of the sharpest new writers around.”
—Daily Mail

“The Hypocrite poses the conundrum with wit, tension and unsparing insight into the generational divide. Here, Jo Hamya has written a powerful allegory for the culture wars at large.”
—Prospect Magazine

“I loved Jo Hamya’s elegantly plotted and wickedly funny The Hypocrite. A perfect and perfectly merciless novel.”
—Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience

“The Hypocrite is engrossing, acerbic and elegantly executed. Jo Hamya artfully reveals her characters' flaws and vulnerabilities with humour, wit and style.”
—Lauren Aimee Curtis, author of Dolores

“Jo Hamya writes beautiful sentences, with The Hypocrite showing off such impeccable descriptions as, ‘on a small white boat that rocked like a bell towards a catalogue of blistered cliff faces.’ The Hypocrite also asks excellent questions about race and class…These gems illuminate the plot, which moves between the present and the past with ease…The Hypocrite offers much to think about regarding being a writer, creating worlds from memory and imagination, and how that affects all parties potentially involved…At its heart, though, this is a novel about familiar and familial pain, the hurts those closest can inflict, even when the harm is unintended or goes completely unnoticed. And it packs a punch, despite its small size. Hamya certainly calls into question the version of masculinity performed by Sophia's father, but she doesn't completely negate him, rendering his embarrassment and confusion beautifully…Impeccable.”
—Shelf Awareness

“This is a book that tells so much about power and imperialism even though it’s just about three members of a family…Hamya is incredible. She’s a writer to watch.”
—Bethannne Patrick, "Keen On" podcast

"Taut, poised."
—The Bookseller, Editors' Choice

“Gender roles, generation gaps, the nature of genius: Hamya explores big ideas but is at her best offering precise observations…A biting novel of art, inheritance, and evolving mores.”
—Kirkus

“Provocative… None of the characters escape Hamya’s bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren ought to take note.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

06/01/2024

As Sophia's father settles into his seat to watch a performance of the play his daughter has written, he doesn't know what to expect; determined to give her an honest evaluation, he has refused to read summaries or reviews. What unfolds before him are three acts faithfully reconstructing a disastrous holiday the two of them took in the Aeolian Islands 13 years earlier, when Sophia was 17. After her parents' divorce, Sophia spent most of her time with her mother, but the trip allowed her to reconnect with her father, a well-known novelist, and help him with his current book. In Sophia's mind, the vacation represented everything wrong with her father as a person. While her father sits in the theater and watches himself impersonated by an actor, Sophia eats lunch with her mother and lays bare their family's dysfunction. Though Sophia doesn't want to turn into her father, the comparisons between them are inescapable. Set in London in 2020 during the pandemic, Hamya's (Three Rooms) novel provides a detailed analysis of isolation, claustrophobia, and inheritance. VERDICT Hamya successfully dissects family relationships into a skillfully written and plotted novel.—Jacqueline Snider

Library Journal

2024-05-17
A controversial 60-something novelist finds the tables turned when his daughter writes a scathing play about their Italian holiday years earlier.

One writer in the family is unfortunate, two make for catastrophe: That’s one takeaway from this sophomore novel by the author of Three Rooms (2021). Sophia’s father (who’s never named) attends a matinee performance of his daughter’s play at a London theater. Upstairs, Sophia and her mother—long divorced from her father but recently pulled back into his orbit by the pandemic—eat lunch in the rooftop restaurant, edgily awaiting his reaction. Downstairs, he’s outraged to discover that the play is based on a vacation he took with teenage Sophia, during which she served as his amanuensis, sulkily bristling at his dictation by day (“He’d never said please for the duration of their work together”) and overhearing his casual sexual encounters by night. As Sophia’s father sits in the audience cringing at her portrayal of him (“He wonders what he’s done to be so abysmally misunderstood by the most important person in his life”), he must acknowledge that her play is brilliant: “It’s like the novel Sophia helped him write, but better.…He’d spent 400 pages anatomising three centuries’ worth of the English novel against his generation’s attitudes to sex, and here she is, neatly holding just one of his books against the entirety of her generation’s values.” Gender roles, generation gaps, the nature of genius: Hamya explores big ideas but is at her best offering precise observations; a sly coda strikingly reframes the drama of Sophia and her father. And who, exactly, is the hypocrite of the title?

A biting novel of art, inheritance, and evolving mores.

Kirkus Reviews