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The Hypocrite
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.
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 hope, 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. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia’s father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.
Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through 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.
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 hope, 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. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia’s father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.
Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts through 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.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 674 reviews
November 29, 2024
To say this is a novel about daddy issues is to undersell its scope. The "daddy issues" at hand are only a specific manifestation of the larger cultural divide that is most evident in gender discourse.
Sophia is frustrated with her father's misogyny, which he associates with simpler, happier times. He's frustrated with her inability to see the vast ways in which the world changed between their generations. All of this plays out as he goes in blind to her play which is, ultimately, about his huge ego and piss poor parenting.
The author gives the two protagonists equal complexity, allowing the reader to empathize with both rather than feeling forced to pick a side. In an interview with The Guardian, Hamya describes asking herself, "Could I just write one massive gray area?" To that end, she has absolutely succeeded. The characters represent changing norms which harm all participants in cross-generational communication.
There are many inconsistencies throughout the characters' opinions that wonderfully reflect human behavior. For example, early in the story Sophia's mother criticizes the father for watching a Louis CK-esque figure in light of the sexual harassment allegations, but later criticizes her daughter for being unable to judge the father's parenting outside the sexist context of his novels. Our feelings and our politics are not always logically consistent, and this story captures those moments in each of its characters.
I would recommend The Hypocrite for those interested in discourse around the "culture wars" and/or who like unique forms of storytelling. The Italian summer setting also make this a great beach read for those who prefer heavy content.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the e-arc.
_______
Edited to 5 stars instead of 4, since I've thought about this book at least once a week since I read it.
Sophia is frustrated with her father's misogyny, which he associates with simpler, happier times. He's frustrated with her inability to see the vast ways in which the world changed between their generations. All of this plays out as he goes in blind to her play which is, ultimately, about his huge ego and piss poor parenting.
The author gives the two protagonists equal complexity, allowing the reader to empathize with both rather than feeling forced to pick a side. In an interview with The Guardian, Hamya describes asking herself, "Could I just write one massive gray area?" To that end, she has absolutely succeeded. The characters represent changing norms which harm all participants in cross-generational communication.
There are many inconsistencies throughout the characters' opinions that wonderfully reflect human behavior. For example, early in the story Sophia's mother criticizes the father for watching a Louis CK-esque figure in light of the sexual harassment allegations, but later criticizes her daughter for being unable to judge the father's parenting outside the sexist context of his novels. Our feelings and our politics are not always logically consistent, and this story captures those moments in each of its characters.
I would recommend The Hypocrite for those interested in discourse around the "culture wars" and/or who like unique forms of storytelling. The Italian summer setting also make this a great beach read for those who prefer heavy content.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the e-arc.
_______
Edited to 5 stars instead of 4, since I've thought about this book at least once a week since I read it.
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December 19, 2024Read this if your father had way too much charisma and you remember way too many girlfriends of yesteryear that cycled in and out of your childhoods revolving door
September 11, 2024
Put quotes around your dialogue, people. For the love of God just put quotation marks in your damn books. I promise this book would have come off just as pretentious and dull if there'd been quotation marks in it.
April 11, 2025
HELLO BANGER? Maybe I gulped this down too fast I didn't really get a chance to chew. No, no, I chewed for sure. I was taking notes while reading! That counts. Guys, it's just short that's all.
Sophia invites her father to see a production of her play, but little does he know... it's about the summer they spent in Sicily together: a season he may look back on fondly, but Sophia doesn't share that sentiment. Awkward! That becomes obvious to father as the lights dim, his character's sex scenes are played for comedy, and the home set degrades over the play's course. Sophia holds grudges he didn't know existed. His tirade on the female Italian population that summer affected her too, apparently. But the thing that bites father, as an author himself, is that he can't help but admire her storytelling. Maybe they share more in common than they'd like to admit! Oh guys, the tension is so dense it's actually uncomfortable.
Our author Jo Hamya shifts between three scenes: father watching play, mother & daughter eating dinner, while flashing back to father & daughter in Sicily. Compulsively readable pacing. Praise covering the book jacket compares Hamya's writing to Rachel Cusk's, a comparison I thought would set Hamya up for destruction (because Cusk is one of one), but she lives up to it. Her style is foggy, dreamy. The similarities are there. But Hamya still manages to establish herself as individual. I really am impressed. And there's this one moment all the scenes coalesce in climax, jumping quickly, just a few lines, back and forth between Sicily, play, dinner. Tension builds so fast it feels like it's gonna explode. LOVED. Had to highlight.
On themes. I neglected to mention this book happens during the COVID pandemic (although no year is assigned, context clues point to 2021). This book immediately shoots up to my small collection of books set during the pandemic that AREN'T in poor taste. The ones that are actually good, you know? The only other member of this group is Ann Patchett's Tom Lake. One hallmark of the pandemic, our culture's obsession with virtuosity, SHINES in here. Matter of fact, the book wouldn't be the same without it. We find this all-too-true transfer of online moral purity slipping into real life. Playwright Sophia pathologises her father's shitty behavior as "abusive" or "anti-feminist," when really it's just shitty behavior. On the flip side, her father is so insensitive all this woke-ness is hoopla to him.
But what I found most interesting were the constant comparisons between father and daughter. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even if it wishes otherwise. Both of them offend. Both are insensitive, only in different ways. They write stories without caring about how the people closest to them will perceive it. I don't know if this is bad, per se, and neither does Hamya. She doesn't try to assign moral accuracy to either of them, assuming that nothing and everything is true, simultaneously. It's masterful. The comparisons between two people who think they couldn't be more different are biting. This is an instant classic.
There are so many more things to dissect between mother/wifehood, Sophia's coming of age, exploration of sexuality, that I could go on. But the virtuosity bit really stuck with me, I think it's the most interesting. All of you should read this. An entertaining and enlightening reading experience really. I'm obsessed.
Sophia invites her father to see a production of her play, but little does he know... it's about the summer they spent in Sicily together: a season he may look back on fondly, but Sophia doesn't share that sentiment. Awkward! That becomes obvious to father as the lights dim, his character's sex scenes are played for comedy, and the home set degrades over the play's course. Sophia holds grudges he didn't know existed. His tirade on the female Italian population that summer affected her too, apparently. But the thing that bites father, as an author himself, is that he can't help but admire her storytelling. Maybe they share more in common than they'd like to admit! Oh guys, the tension is so dense it's actually uncomfortable.
Our author Jo Hamya shifts between three scenes: father watching play, mother & daughter eating dinner, while flashing back to father & daughter in Sicily. Compulsively readable pacing. Praise covering the book jacket compares Hamya's writing to Rachel Cusk's, a comparison I thought would set Hamya up for destruction (because Cusk is one of one), but she lives up to it. Her style is foggy, dreamy. The similarities are there. But Hamya still manages to establish herself as individual. I really am impressed. And there's this one moment all the scenes coalesce in climax, jumping quickly, just a few lines, back and forth between Sicily, play, dinner. Tension builds so fast it feels like it's gonna explode. LOVED. Had to highlight.
On themes. I neglected to mention this book happens during the COVID pandemic (although no year is assigned, context clues point to 2021). This book immediately shoots up to my small collection of books set during the pandemic that AREN'T in poor taste. The ones that are actually good, you know? The only other member of this group is Ann Patchett's Tom Lake. One hallmark of the pandemic, our culture's obsession with virtuosity, SHINES in here. Matter of fact, the book wouldn't be the same without it. We find this all-too-true transfer of online moral purity slipping into real life. Playwright Sophia pathologises her father's shitty behavior as "abusive" or "anti-feminist," when really it's just shitty behavior. On the flip side, her father is so insensitive all this woke-ness is hoopla to him.
But what I found most interesting were the constant comparisons between father and daughter. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even if it wishes otherwise. Both of them offend. Both are insensitive, only in different ways. They write stories without caring about how the people closest to them will perceive it. I don't know if this is bad, per se, and neither does Hamya. She doesn't try to assign moral accuracy to either of them, assuming that nothing and everything is true, simultaneously. It's masterful. The comparisons between two people who think they couldn't be more different are biting. This is an instant classic.
There are so many more things to dissect between mother/wifehood, Sophia's coming of age, exploration of sexuality, that I could go on. But the virtuosity bit really stuck with me, I think it's the most interesting. All of you should read this. An entertaining and enlightening reading experience really. I'm obsessed.
August 6, 2024
4.5 stars - thank you to pantheon and netgalley for allowing me to read this early!
jo hamya i was unfamiliar with your game. three rooms was a disappointment for me last year; i loved the description but not the execution. happy to say that i loved this book! i love when an author proves me wrong!
the hypocrite centers around sophia, a 20-something playwright, and her father, a successful novelist who divorced from sophia’s mother when she was young. the book is split up into acts, like a play, and follows a few different threads simultaneously:
1. sophia’s father being absolutely blindsided by the play that sophia wrote about a vacation they had taken together 10 years earlier
2. sophia and her mother having lunch together while they wait for her father to finish watching the play, which skewers his behavior on said vacation
3. flashbacks of the vacation, where sophia’s father had her transcribe his novel and allowed her to embark on some uncomfortable adventures with a boy
hamya said in an interview that with this book, she wanted to try her hand at writing “one massive gray area” and i think she definitely succeeded. both characters get their feelings hurt and hurt each other, and the reader has to sort through the thoughts and actions of each. it’s hard to say that one person is completely in the right and the other is completely in the wrong. sophia was uncomfortable with being forced into helping her father work on his novel, which she felt was full of outdated ideas. sophia’s father is uncomfortable with her play, which portrays him as a condescending womanizer who was brazen about bringing random women back to the vacation home that he was sharing with his daughter.
the thing that really blew me away with the hypocrite was the writing style. it was descriptive and atmospheric, with moments of poetic stream-of consciousness. hamya’s descriptions of the sicilian island makes this a perfect summertime read, and the complexity of the characters’ emotions are rendered in a very raw way. it was propulsive and just a kind of writing that really clicked with me, which i didn’t get with three rooms.
this book is being compared to rachel cusk, which i can see due to the clashes between generations and gender, and themes of creating art. it’s also being compared to deborah levy, and i did get hot milk vibes with the fraught family relationships and the setting. i’d also say it’s for fans of daughter by claudia dey, due to the similar family dynamics and inclusion of the theater. ultimately though, the structure and style of the book stands out to me as being quite unique.
jo hamya i was unfamiliar with your game. three rooms was a disappointment for me last year; i loved the description but not the execution. happy to say that i loved this book! i love when an author proves me wrong!
the hypocrite centers around sophia, a 20-something playwright, and her father, a successful novelist who divorced from sophia’s mother when she was young. the book is split up into acts, like a play, and follows a few different threads simultaneously:
1. sophia’s father being absolutely blindsided by the play that sophia wrote about a vacation they had taken together 10 years earlier
2. sophia and her mother having lunch together while they wait for her father to finish watching the play, which skewers his behavior on said vacation
3. flashbacks of the vacation, where sophia’s father had her transcribe his novel and allowed her to embark on some uncomfortable adventures with a boy
hamya said in an interview that with this book, she wanted to try her hand at writing “one massive gray area” and i think she definitely succeeded. both characters get their feelings hurt and hurt each other, and the reader has to sort through the thoughts and actions of each. it’s hard to say that one person is completely in the right and the other is completely in the wrong. sophia was uncomfortable with being forced into helping her father work on his novel, which she felt was full of outdated ideas. sophia’s father is uncomfortable with her play, which portrays him as a condescending womanizer who was brazen about bringing random women back to the vacation home that he was sharing with his daughter.
the thing that really blew me away with the hypocrite was the writing style. it was descriptive and atmospheric, with moments of poetic stream-of consciousness. hamya’s descriptions of the sicilian island makes this a perfect summertime read, and the complexity of the characters’ emotions are rendered in a very raw way. it was propulsive and just a kind of writing that really clicked with me, which i didn’t get with three rooms.
this book is being compared to rachel cusk, which i can see due to the clashes between generations and gender, and themes of creating art. it’s also being compared to deborah levy, and i did get hot milk vibes with the fraught family relationships and the setting. i’d also say it’s for fans of daughter by claudia dey, due to the similar family dynamics and inclusion of the theater. ultimately though, the structure and style of the book stands out to me as being quite unique.
August 30, 2024
girl is mad that her dad gets pussy and she doesn’t, makes a play about it…. yawn
June 28, 2024
3.5
A young woman Sophia, has written a play. It is set in a summer holiday house in Sicily, a place she once spent a month with her father, typing his dictated novel, hanging out alone and observing the women he bedded nightly.
Her father, the (in)famous author, attends a matinee showing 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. It might be about him. About that holiday.
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 the period in the past that inspired the play. Sophia is in Sicily and looking forward to spending the longest uninterrupted time with her father she has ever had. She doesn't realise that she will spend most of the time alone or in the company of Anto, the nephew of the woman who cleans the house.
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 scenes pass in a kind of circumambulation, one after the other, each progressing onward. Revelation slowly comes to the father seeing himself from another's perspective, through actor's on a stage, where he cannot interrupt or change the narrative, he must bear witness.
The mother is witnessed by both the daughter and the waiter, who forces her to account for her deteriorating behaviour.
The daughter is equally 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.
So who is the hypocrite?
Everyone it seems.
A young woman Sophia, has written a play. It is set in a summer holiday house in Sicily, a place she once spent a month with her father, typing his dictated novel, hanging out alone and observing the women he bedded nightly.
Her father, the (in)famous author, attends a matinee showing 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. It might be about him. About that holiday.
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 the period in the past that inspired the play. Sophia is in Sicily and looking forward to spending the longest uninterrupted time with her father she has ever had. She doesn't realise that she will spend most of the time alone or in the company of Anto, the nephew of the woman who cleans the house.
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 scenes pass in a kind of circumambulation, one after the other, each progressing onward. Revelation slowly comes to the father seeing himself from another's perspective, through actor's on a stage, where he cannot interrupt or change the narrative, he must bear witness.
The mother is witnessed by both the daughter and the waiter, who forces her to account for her deteriorating behaviour.
The daughter is equally 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.
So who is the hypocrite?
Everyone it seems.
October 14, 2024
This is the best novel I have read in ages. There is a scene between the father and a fellow attendee of his daughter’s play that is one of the best set pieces I’ve read. I wonder if Hamya wrote the entire book for this exchange. There’s also a phone call between the father and his daughter while he’s in a cafe toilet that is brilliant. This felt like watching an excellent European film after having watched a lot of American cinema. It has completely renewed my faith in fiction and energised me about the possibilities of the form. It’s so structurally interesting with a historic family holiday, a play based on said holiday and a meal between mother and daughter playing out at the same time as the father watches the play for the first time. Genius. The prose is delicious, everything I want plus more. It’s a rave from me.
June 4, 2025
Daddy issues and the dad with the issues or the consequences of being raised (this is a generous word for that man's investment in his child) by a semi absentee edgelord who doesn't know that he is one. It had some good moment and some reflections that were mildly interesting, the mild aspect came across as quite intentional.
It's no secret that I love Rachel Cusk's work so of course when I read that Hamya was poised to be the next Cusk I got really excited and that might have done the book a disfavor because Cusk could probably make a grocery shopping list into a masterpiece. She's also compared to Deborah Levy and I did get strong August Blue vibes from this one. Which is not to say that I think Hamya actively tried to emulate Levy just that the novels have similar moods and vibes and characters. Also an interest with seemingly banal vacation happenings changing the course of one's life being a big theme made the parallel easy to see.
If you're looking for a summer read that will leave you with a vague nostalgic sense of emptiness, this one might just be it.
3.5 rounded up.
It's no secret that I love Rachel Cusk's work so of course when I read that Hamya was poised to be the next Cusk I got really excited and that might have done the book a disfavor because Cusk could probably make a grocery shopping list into a masterpiece. She's also compared to Deborah Levy and I did get strong August Blue vibes from this one. Which is not to say that I think Hamya actively tried to emulate Levy just that the novels have similar moods and vibes and characters. Also an interest with seemingly banal vacation happenings changing the course of one's life being a big theme made the parallel easy to see.
If you're looking for a summer read that will leave you with a vague nostalgic sense of emptiness, this one might just be it.
3.5 rounded up.
May 8, 2024
The premise of this novel is very promising: a daughter is made to transcribe a book by her famous author father. The experience has traumatised her and she writes a play about it. The story hinges on its multimedia and multifocal approach: it is a novel about a book that is being written (by the father) that is turned into a minutely described play (by the daughter). The plot is also structured like drama, and the prose dabbles in poetry. Still following along? I'll let one of the characters explain:
Let me get this straight, she murmurs quietly [...]. 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. (p. 194)
The story is set over the course of a day and the reader slowly sees the play unfolding through the eyes of the father. Hamya is a very detailed and descriptive visual writer, which is why the story works well. So far, so good.
Yet... It fell a little flat for me. I'll admit: it's a tight and cleverly constructed novel. But it doesn't work as a feminist story about a horrible man. Don't get me wrong, the father is by no means pleasant, but I kept waiting for something really abominable and unforgiveable to happen. If the point of the novel is not to explore these intergenerational conflicts, but to present criticism about the young, 'sensitive' generation, it sort of works better? Though I'm not sure that was intentional.
April 13, 2024
2,5
This was maybe too smart for me. The book description sounded good and it was certainly well-written, but I’m afraid it didn’t hold my attention.
Thank you Pantheon and Edelweiss for the ARC.
This was maybe too smart for me. The book description sounded good and it was certainly well-written, but I’m afraid it didn’t hold my attention.
Thank you Pantheon and Edelweiss for the ARC.
February 23, 2025
raise ur hand if u have ✨daddy issues✨
🙋🏻♀️
🙋🏻♀️
September 2, 2024
3,5
I should have read this with a book club and not in audio, because I am sure there is much more in it than I got out of it.
The Hypocrite is about a middle-aged writer who visits a performance of his daughter's play, only to discover the play is about him and a holiday in Sicily they had together some ten years earlier. He is basically 'being Me Too'd' by her.
It's an intriguing premise about intergenerational conflict, about a men who is unwilling to admit his behavior and his parenting were not ok. But also about a privileged daughter writing about first world problems.
I found the surprising ending quite smart as it forced me to think the whole thing over again, think over the title again, and also see how I had been feeling sympathy where perhaps I shouldn't have. But overall I am left with the feeling that more could have been explored given the promising setting.
I should have read this with a book club and not in audio, because I am sure there is much more in it than I got out of it.
The Hypocrite is about a middle-aged writer who visits a performance of his daughter's play, only to discover the play is about him and a holiday in Sicily they had together some ten years earlier. He is basically 'being Me Too'd' by her.
It's an intriguing premise about intergenerational conflict, about a men who is unwilling to admit his behavior and his parenting were not ok. But also about a privileged daughter writing about first world problems.
I found the surprising ending quite smart as it forced me to think the whole thing over again, think over the title again, and also see how I had been feeling sympathy where perhaps I shouldn't have. But overall I am left with the feeling that more could have been explored given the promising setting.
July 13, 2025
3.5 stars. Hamya’s atmospheric and descriptive writing style was a winner for me showing her characters raw emotions, their realness, and the Sicilian island setting felt as enchanting as if you were there in person. The story is about a fractured father-daughter relationship — a daughter who feels distanced from her father due to his misogynistic attitude throughout her entire life. She reveals their relationship - flaws and all - through a play she wrote whilst her father observes from the audience. If you like character studies this will fit that itch. Pub. 3/6/25
January 20, 2025
There are a couple of scenes/passages in this book that are so good (the intermission and the bathroom phone call). Everyone's a hypocrite, everyone's living in the grey in this book. Loved the writing and the format.
April 29, 2025
3.5 ★
Overall, I liked the idea of this, but I wasn’t too connected to the characters.
Short Synopsis
A daughter puts on a play about her father and how he wasn’t a good father, all while her father is in the audience watching how he failed her.
Overall, I liked the idea of this, but I wasn’t too connected to the characters.
Short Synopsis
A daughter puts on a play about her father and how he wasn’t a good father, all while her father is in the audience watching how he failed her.
Read
December 25, 2024one thing i am trying SO SO SO HARD to do is to appreciate fiction and narratives without needing to resonate in anyway and this book TESTED ME my goodness! it is all about the silly little messy thing that we call daughter-father relationships and maybe the anger it evoked in me was intentional ??? i feel like sophia (the daughter) (feel like i didn't have to clarify that) has a lot of resentment towards her father, rightly so in this circumstance, and maybe the bitter angy 14 year old version of me would HAVE LOVED this. its easy to forget your parents are living life for the first time too, and i feel like the novel doesn't really explore the reservations you make for that realisation as you get older.
regardless it is sooooo beautifully written. its set in both london and a pretty italian beach town yet somehow its made me more appreciative of living in london which is no easy feat ! also pretty short which is nice when i am trying to consume as much literature as i can before i go back to uni
regardless it is sooooo beautifully written. its set in both london and a pretty italian beach town yet somehow its made me more appreciative of living in london which is no easy feat ! also pretty short which is nice when i am trying to consume as much literature as i can before i go back to uni
August 14, 2024
Utterly intriguing, requiring the reader to pay attention as it skips around in a unique structure. The "great man" here is a well known author whose daughter has fleshed out what she thinks of their relationship in the form of a play that is being performed during pandemic times. Tension, not all of it on stage, propels the central characters as well as those playing their counterparts. I was somewhat nonplused in that he was always referred to as "Sophia's father" and his ex, "Sophia's mother." By not giving them names, Jo Hamya has reduced their roles so as to only be relevant as they pertain to Sophia.
November 20, 2024
I loved this novel, a uniquely structured story made up of three parallel narratives. Sophia sits at a restaurant with her mother, who is teetering on drunken rudeness and obnoxiously pestering the waiter. Sophia, meanwhile, is more anxious to hear what her father thinks of her new play. Her father, a successful novelist, is watching the matinee performance, an almost exact reenactment of a holiday in Sicily he had taken her on years ago when she was an adolescent; he now sits and observes these embarrassing memories staged before his eyes in the theatre, seeing his worst self acted out garishly on the proscenium, a torturous form of public shaming. Finally, in parenthetical chapters, we read the story of what happened on that vacation, through Sophia's earnest teenage eyes, not dramatized for the theatre. It's a gripping story. Sophia's play is a damning portrait of her father, an absent and distracted parent, a compulsive philanderer, a man with a caustic sense of humor and low tolerance for children's whims. Without a doubt, he loves his daughter but he is also overly critical of her and careless with her feelings. He's a feminist in theory but a misogynist by habit. While on vacation, he barely does anything with his daughter; he has to write his book; at night he brings back new women for affairs. Searching for ways to entertain his daughter, he simply makes her his amanuensis and dictates the book to her as she copies it. It's a humiliation, ventriloquizing his daughter's nascent literary voice with his own salacious stories.
Sophia's father is a kind of Philip Roth or Michelle Houellebecq—a novelist whose books center around disaffected men and are full of phallic, orgiastic imagery, always searching for some new, outré way to describe the penis, with plots full of cocaine-fueled benders and erotic smut. His novels purport to be critiques of the extremes of countercultural libertinism but in fact they are just pornographic fantasies of masculine conquest. He might claim to be a feminist but his novels hate women: sexually liberal women, smart women, independent women, are always lampooned and dominated. Sophia can't forget the time he said of her mother, his former wife, "the only thing missing from your mother's otherwise perfect face is a beak." Nowadays, in a more critical, justice-oriented, "woke" age, his sardonic remarks and provocative quips have lost their edgy daring. "Suddenly the world thought he was a misogynist, that he was against the gays," he thinks to himself, reflecting on the old quotes that have been dredged up in recent years. He's no longer simply divisive; he has aged out of relevance.
But the real cleverness novel is that Sophia's father is not the only hypocrite. Sophia's father reminded me in a way of Professor Higgins from Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, crafting his perfect woman, Eliza Doolittle, by making her imitate his voice and accent. Through dictation, Higgins turns the vulgar-talking street-vendor into an upper-class sophisticate. Likewise, reading the draft of his novel to his daughter, the father has inculcated his daughter with the same ideas about writing and about character—in fact, watching the play, he feels that he has not simply been publicly embarrassed but rivaled and outdone. The way she writes sex is better than anything has ever been capable of. She hasn't simply represented him on stage; she has killed him and bested his writing. Sophia's mother is less impressed: "you certainly write like him," she says. The irony is that, whatever her feminist credibility, Sophia has inherited her father's phallic obsession and chauvinism: her father's penis is still center of the literary work and Sophia has simply used women in her stories as props around him. Her father sees it too: "she is pitiless to every female character she's wrought." And in real life when Sophia talks with her mother, she seems unable to comprehend why her mother married and divorced him. She is as blinkered and self-absorbed as her father.
This novel is clever, original, sharp. I strongly recommend it.
Sophia's father is a kind of Philip Roth or Michelle Houellebecq—a novelist whose books center around disaffected men and are full of phallic, orgiastic imagery, always searching for some new, outré way to describe the penis, with plots full of cocaine-fueled benders and erotic smut. His novels purport to be critiques of the extremes of countercultural libertinism but in fact they are just pornographic fantasies of masculine conquest. He might claim to be a feminist but his novels hate women: sexually liberal women, smart women, independent women, are always lampooned and dominated. Sophia can't forget the time he said of her mother, his former wife, "the only thing missing from your mother's otherwise perfect face is a beak." Nowadays, in a more critical, justice-oriented, "woke" age, his sardonic remarks and provocative quips have lost their edgy daring. "Suddenly the world thought he was a misogynist, that he was against the gays," he thinks to himself, reflecting on the old quotes that have been dredged up in recent years. He's no longer simply divisive; he has aged out of relevance.
But the real cleverness novel is that Sophia's father is not the only hypocrite. Sophia's father reminded me in a way of Professor Higgins from Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, crafting his perfect woman, Eliza Doolittle, by making her imitate his voice and accent. Through dictation, Higgins turns the vulgar-talking street-vendor into an upper-class sophisticate. Likewise, reading the draft of his novel to his daughter, the father has inculcated his daughter with the same ideas about writing and about character—in fact, watching the play, he feels that he has not simply been publicly embarrassed but rivaled and outdone. The way she writes sex is better than anything has ever been capable of. She hasn't simply represented him on stage; she has killed him and bested his writing. Sophia's mother is less impressed: "you certainly write like him," she says. The irony is that, whatever her feminist credibility, Sophia has inherited her father's phallic obsession and chauvinism: her father's penis is still center of the literary work and Sophia has simply used women in her stories as props around him. Her father sees it too: "she is pitiless to every female character she's wrought." And in real life when Sophia talks with her mother, she seems unable to comprehend why her mother married and divorced him. She is as blinkered and self-absorbed as her father.
This novel is clever, original, sharp. I strongly recommend it.
September 2, 2024
loooved, such spectacularly effective sentences
January 3, 2025
Just finished this book and I am still reeling with confused feelings for the three main characters. A man goes to see his adult daughter's lauded play only to discover it is an unfavorable portrait of him, causing me to cringe with embarrassment with him as the audience comes to understand the scenario.
The rest of the book deals with this father, his ex-wife and the couple's grown daughter (the playwright)
Flashbacks to earlier times portray all these characters as narcissistic, at times even vicious and their relationships as profoundly dysfunctional. I wondered how it could possibly end and was amazed at the whirlwind of actions, thoughts and characterizations that Hamya was able to put together in what seemed to me a perfect way! 4.5
The rest of the book deals with this father, his ex-wife and the couple's grown daughter (the playwright)
Flashbacks to earlier times portray all these characters as narcissistic, at times even vicious and their relationships as profoundly dysfunctional. I wondered how it could possibly end and was amazed at the whirlwind of actions, thoughts and characterizations that Hamya was able to put together in what seemed to me a perfect way! 4.5
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May 7, 2025Ehh no thanks. Maybe the audiobook just wasn’t great but man I was bored by 15% and couldn’t concentrate for the life of me.
December 24, 2024
Excellent! Really eviscerating but also nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of two generations in the form of a father-daughter conflict. Father, a 60ish male author of the Roth/Updike variety (but British) is attending a performance of a play his 27 y.o. daughter, Sophia, has written about a vacation the two spent together 10 years prior in Sicily, which lambastes her father as a stand-in for all men of a certain age and temperament. But guess what? She's a young woman of a certain age and temperament too, and there are no clear judgements to be made here about who occupies the moral high ground. Who, indeed, is "the hypocrite"?
One of the astonishing things about The Hypocrite is how much emotional and cultural baggage is packed in (and unpacked) over the course of this brief novel, which takes place in three settings: two contemporary (Sophia having lunch with her mother; her father watching the play) in what we assume is 2020 or 2021, just past COVID lockdowns; the third in the Sicilian house Sophia and her father stayed in. The transitions between these scenes are seamless; although there are a couple of interjected chapters that use second-person POV that are a bit odd.
There are some very important secondary characters that, at crucial junctures, deliver commentary on the main characters -- these might not be fully fleshed out, but they also don't feel tacked on or contrived solely as plot devices either.
Hamya has a strong grip on the major narrative arcs and the specific details alike. There are moments of laugh-out-loud humour and scene-setting that deftly reveal character. Case in point, we see Sophia carefully arranging the backdrop that will appear on camera when she's online with her therapist, the orchid arranged just-so, the dirty clothes and old pizza boxes tossed out of visual range. We learn that Sophia relied on her father's extended health insurance to get an appointment with said therapist so that she could work through her daddy issues -- an irony, one could almost say hypocrisy, that, in an unusual moment of self-insight, even Sophia recognizes.
It's extraordinary to me that Jo Hamya is just 27 y.o. herself, and this is already her 2nd novel. There is a maturity here, not only in the writing but also in the emotional intelligence she brings to her characters' motivations, reflections and interactions.
Truly enjoyed - and consumed by audio with an excellent reading by Claire Kinson.
A four for now and we'll see what kind of staying power it has.
One of the astonishing things about The Hypocrite is how much emotional and cultural baggage is packed in (and unpacked) over the course of this brief novel, which takes place in three settings: two contemporary (Sophia having lunch with her mother; her father watching the play) in what we assume is 2020 or 2021, just past COVID lockdowns; the third in the Sicilian house Sophia and her father stayed in. The transitions between these scenes are seamless; although there are a couple of interjected chapters that use second-person POV that are a bit odd.
There are some very important secondary characters that, at crucial junctures, deliver commentary on the main characters -- these might not be fully fleshed out, but they also don't feel tacked on or contrived solely as plot devices either.
Hamya has a strong grip on the major narrative arcs and the specific details alike. There are moments of laugh-out-loud humour and scene-setting that deftly reveal character. Case in point, we see Sophia carefully arranging the backdrop that will appear on camera when she's online with her therapist, the orchid arranged just-so, the dirty clothes and old pizza boxes tossed out of visual range. We learn that Sophia relied on her father's extended health insurance to get an appointment with said therapist so that she could work through her daddy issues -- an irony, one could almost say hypocrisy, that, in an unusual moment of self-insight, even Sophia recognizes.
It's extraordinary to me that Jo Hamya is just 27 y.o. herself, and this is already her 2nd novel. There is a maturity here, not only in the writing but also in the emotional intelligence she brings to her characters' motivations, reflections and interactions.
Truly enjoyed - and consumed by audio with an excellent reading by Claire Kinson.
A four for now and we'll see what kind of staying power it has.
February 7, 2025
I feel like I’ve read some variation of this book about 50 times in the last few years.
The theme, process, and even the setting to a lesser extent of this is, apparently, very marketable right now to female readers. Which kind of makes sense, except that we’ve seen SO much of this that anything on this topic that doesn’t bring something truly fresh to the discussion just feels derivative.
There’s nothing wrong with the bones of this story, and the writing is certainly more than adequate. Perhaps if you get to this one first, then this feels like the “good” book on the topic and it’s the others that feel derivative. Although I could argue that this theme has been a bit shopworn for years and so I’m not sure why we keep publishing novels that are just another tale of “men of an older generation are trash, let’s expose them.”
The fact that this is true and needed to be said the first 50 times doesn’t leave me any less bored with books that want to reuse the theme without bringing anything original to the equation.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
The theme, process, and even the setting to a lesser extent of this is, apparently, very marketable right now to female readers. Which kind of makes sense, except that we’ve seen SO much of this that anything on this topic that doesn’t bring something truly fresh to the discussion just feels derivative.
There’s nothing wrong with the bones of this story, and the writing is certainly more than adequate. Perhaps if you get to this one first, then this feels like the “good” book on the topic and it’s the others that feel derivative. Although I could argue that this theme has been a bit shopworn for years and so I’m not sure why we keep publishing novels that are just another tale of “men of an older generation are trash, let’s expose them.”
The fact that this is true and needed to be said the first 50 times doesn’t leave me any less bored with books that want to reuse the theme without bringing anything original to the equation.
*I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
July 15, 2024
I can’t think of one thing to say about this book.
August 8, 2025
I very much wanted to like The Hypocrite. And in some places, I really did. But it would be hypocritical of me to not admit that at times, I wished the characters would get out of their own way, so I could FEEL what was going on or feel – anything. Too often, my brain was engaged but my heart wasn’t.
The Hypocrite takes place in the early months of COVID, during lock-down. That’s not a coincidence: the characters, Sophia and her famous novelist father, are locked-down in a borrowed villa on a Sicilian island. Sophia, a teenager, is on the cusp of “becoming”, and her recently-divorced father hasn’t a clue as to how to really be a parent.
Sophia takes dictation (complete with quote marks and commas) of his newest book during the day. She listens to him have raw sex with numerous women at night. Eventually, she starts a budding relationship with the housekeeper’s son who alternately, attracts and repels her. She makes up stories for him, pretending her father’s novel is her own. And time goes by.
The teenager is now an adult and a playwright in her own right. And that’s where the book opens: as the father sits in the audience of a London theater, watching a character who is based on him – a careless dad, a clueless lover, a self-absorbed writer. Is she trying to get his attention or just get even? Is she constructing an arrangement where the audience can laugh with her about her father? Or is she showcasing generational differences? And what if she’s inadvertently revealing the part of her father who is so much like her – bourgeois, merciless, shut off, sacrificing relationships to art?
There’s a lot here to muse about, and an ultimate question: is there any kind of catharsis with recrafting memories to humiliate the ones who neglected us, even if it’s done for the sake of art? Is exploiting sexuality any better when it’s done to illuminate issues rather than exploit them? The last third of this book captured me by belatedly making me feel empathy for the father, lost in the headlights, and his daughter, who needed affirmation. All in all, I’d rate this 3.5.
The Hypocrite takes place in the early months of COVID, during lock-down. That’s not a coincidence: the characters, Sophia and her famous novelist father, are locked-down in a borrowed villa on a Sicilian island. Sophia, a teenager, is on the cusp of “becoming”, and her recently-divorced father hasn’t a clue as to how to really be a parent.
Sophia takes dictation (complete with quote marks and commas) of his newest book during the day. She listens to him have raw sex with numerous women at night. Eventually, she starts a budding relationship with the housekeeper’s son who alternately, attracts and repels her. She makes up stories for him, pretending her father’s novel is her own. And time goes by.
The teenager is now an adult and a playwright in her own right. And that’s where the book opens: as the father sits in the audience of a London theater, watching a character who is based on him – a careless dad, a clueless lover, a self-absorbed writer. Is she trying to get his attention or just get even? Is she constructing an arrangement where the audience can laugh with her about her father? Or is she showcasing generational differences? And what if she’s inadvertently revealing the part of her father who is so much like her – bourgeois, merciless, shut off, sacrificing relationships to art?
There’s a lot here to muse about, and an ultimate question: is there any kind of catharsis with recrafting memories to humiliate the ones who neglected us, even if it’s done for the sake of art? Is exploiting sexuality any better when it’s done to illuminate issues rather than exploit them? The last third of this book captured me by belatedly making me feel empathy for the father, lost in the headlights, and his daughter, who needed affirmation. All in all, I’d rate this 3.5.
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August 11, 2024thank you pantheon and netgalley for the digital arc!!
i read 92% of this while traveling (mostly trapped in the baltimore airport…for 13 hours…moving on) and read the rest a day later once again in an airport (for a slightly more reasonable amount of time lol).
the hypocrite follows young playwright sophia who has turned her relationship with her novelist father into a play. told in separate acts, we follow sophia at lunch with her mother as she waits for her father to finish watching the play, the father's experience while watching the play, and flashbacks to the summer the two spent together in sicily which inspired sophia's writing.
i really enjoyed the process of reading this (mostly) in one stretch. i was able to get really immersed in the setting and the state of mind of the characters. jo hamya so expertly captured the generational divide between father and daughter here. as a novelist, the father has certain ideas about himself and society that he feels are fine to explore through his writing, even if outsiders would disagree. as a playwright, sophia is intent on pointing out how those very ideas shaped her understanding of her father for the worse, essentially holding up a mirror to the worst parts of her father for him and the rest of the world to see.
because of this, the hypocrite is asking a lot of interesting questions about gender, familial relationships, privacy, and artistic freedom. at the end, none of these issues are solidly answered on behalf of the characters. we as the reader are left to answer them for ourselves in the same way the characters are left to grapple with them. i think that is one of the strengths of the hypocrite: it really thrives in the moral gray area it creates.
in the home stretch, things got a little hazy for me and i couldn’t tell if it was the book or me suffering from sleep deprivation and airport anxiety. so i returned to the final chapter and confirmed: it was the book lol but i think that was intentional. the chaotic nature of the final act really mirrored the mindset of the characters at that moment. jo hamya really captured the anxiety of one's understanding of oneself being totally disrupted by outside information and how that realization can completely derail how one moves through life.
i wasn't sure how much of this would stick with me after i finished reading, but here i am a week later still thinking about it!! this definitely makes for a perfect summer read, too!!
i read 92% of this while traveling (mostly trapped in the baltimore airport…for 13 hours…moving on) and read the rest a day later once again in an airport (for a slightly more reasonable amount of time lol).
the hypocrite follows young playwright sophia who has turned her relationship with her novelist father into a play. told in separate acts, we follow sophia at lunch with her mother as she waits for her father to finish watching the play, the father's experience while watching the play, and flashbacks to the summer the two spent together in sicily which inspired sophia's writing.
i really enjoyed the process of reading this (mostly) in one stretch. i was able to get really immersed in the setting and the state of mind of the characters. jo hamya so expertly captured the generational divide between father and daughter here. as a novelist, the father has certain ideas about himself and society that he feels are fine to explore through his writing, even if outsiders would disagree. as a playwright, sophia is intent on pointing out how those very ideas shaped her understanding of her father for the worse, essentially holding up a mirror to the worst parts of her father for him and the rest of the world to see.
because of this, the hypocrite is asking a lot of interesting questions about gender, familial relationships, privacy, and artistic freedom. at the end, none of these issues are solidly answered on behalf of the characters. we as the reader are left to answer them for ourselves in the same way the characters are left to grapple with them. i think that is one of the strengths of the hypocrite: it really thrives in the moral gray area it creates.
in the home stretch, things got a little hazy for me and i couldn’t tell if it was the book or me suffering from sleep deprivation and airport anxiety. so i returned to the final chapter and confirmed: it was the book lol but i think that was intentional. the chaotic nature of the final act really mirrored the mindset of the characters at that moment. jo hamya really captured the anxiety of one's understanding of oneself being totally disrupted by outside information and how that realization can completely derail how one moves through life.
i wasn't sure how much of this would stick with me after i finished reading, but here i am a week later still thinking about it!! this definitely makes for a perfect summer read, too!!
September 17, 2024
4 - I loved the character work, loved the concept, loved what it was saying. Just missing something that would have made me love it as a whole
February 2, 2025
I guess we're all hypocrites??
A famous author spends a summer in Sicily with his teenage daughter Sophia while he's writing his latest book.
Ten years later, Sophia stages a play in London, recreating that summer from her point of view, which, to put it mildly, is a less-than-flattering view of her father and his sexual escapades during that time.
While her father is in the audience watching this play in stunned, excruciating shame, Sophia is having lunch with her mother, his ex-wife, in a restaurant nearby. Her mother gets drunk and becomes loud and obnoxious, making a scene and ultimately being asked to leave.
None of these characters were likeable. This is a wildly dysfunctional family of giant, narcissistic egos.
But what a way to tell your dad he's a dick!
A famous author spends a summer in Sicily with his teenage daughter Sophia while he's writing his latest book.
Ten years later, Sophia stages a play in London, recreating that summer from her point of view, which, to put it mildly, is a less-than-flattering view of her father and his sexual escapades during that time.
While her father is in the audience watching this play in stunned, excruciating shame, Sophia is having lunch with her mother, his ex-wife, in a restaurant nearby. Her mother gets drunk and becomes loud and obnoxious, making a scene and ultimately being asked to leave.
None of these characters were likeable. This is a wildly dysfunctional family of giant, narcissistic egos.
But what a way to tell your dad he's a dick!
August 25, 2024
Western Culture manufactures unhappy women
The book is well written and a compelling about a trio of unlikeable people. However, the daughter, and accomplished playwright is brimming with the psychological traits of the dark triad, especially emotional Machiavellianism. She’s vengeful, but pretends her desire to humiliate others is part of some superior progressive morality. In the end, you discover she’s just a neurotic affluent girl who’s mad that the world doesn’t conform to her narcissism and neuroticism. If her father is an unreflective misogynist, she fails to realize she’s a deliberate misandrist with “daddy issues.”
Whether it was the author’s intention or not, I found myself rooting for rakish Dad, who is destroyed by his daughter. Not because he’s a great guy, but the neuroticism and self-manufactured emotionally fragility and meanness of his daughter, an accomplished playwright, is grating. She’s a typical affluent female type, who doesn’t seem to realize her moral fervor is just as much an expression of narcissism as her father’s devotion to his writerly prestige and womanizing.
If she does realize it, the humiliation she visits upon her father, is all the worse because it’s mean and vengeful. Her father’s failings, at least, are inadvertent, because he seems to lack self-reflection, but does possess the adult capacity to apologize when he comes to certain emotional realizations.
Ultimately, the daughter is a mean girl venting her emotional incontinence on both her parents for not living up to her fragile, absurd standards. The daughter speaks of “trauma.” And here’s the thing, the trauma she is brooding over is not a trauma at all. It’s all adopted performative, socially acceptable virtue signaling. It’s just the normal stuff of life that we experience, with imperfections of the people we love and their ours too.
What is it about contemporary life that makes it impossible for us to live with the normal imperfections of people, especially those we love? Why is it such a punitive spirit toward the blind spots, imperfections and failures we all experience become such a dominant spirit between generations?
I’d prefer the company of a selfish rake, with some relationship to the real world, to that an emotionally fragile mean girl any day of the week. Especially when that mean girl chose to wound her own family in service of her narcissism and neuroticism, pretending it was enlightened morality to wield the knife against her loved ones, whatever their failings.
The book is well written and a compelling about a trio of unlikeable people. However, the daughter, and accomplished playwright is brimming with the psychological traits of the dark triad, especially emotional Machiavellianism. She’s vengeful, but pretends her desire to humiliate others is part of some superior progressive morality. In the end, you discover she’s just a neurotic affluent girl who’s mad that the world doesn’t conform to her narcissism and neuroticism. If her father is an unreflective misogynist, she fails to realize she’s a deliberate misandrist with “daddy issues.”
Whether it was the author’s intention or not, I found myself rooting for rakish Dad, who is destroyed by his daughter. Not because he’s a great guy, but the neuroticism and self-manufactured emotionally fragility and meanness of his daughter, an accomplished playwright, is grating. She’s a typical affluent female type, who doesn’t seem to realize her moral fervor is just as much an expression of narcissism as her father’s devotion to his writerly prestige and womanizing.
If she does realize it, the humiliation she visits upon her father, is all the worse because it’s mean and vengeful. Her father’s failings, at least, are inadvertent, because he seems to lack self-reflection, but does possess the adult capacity to apologize when he comes to certain emotional realizations.
Ultimately, the daughter is a mean girl venting her emotional incontinence on both her parents for not living up to her fragile, absurd standards. The daughter speaks of “trauma.” And here’s the thing, the trauma she is brooding over is not a trauma at all. It’s all adopted performative, socially acceptable virtue signaling. It’s just the normal stuff of life that we experience, with imperfections of the people we love and their ours too.
What is it about contemporary life that makes it impossible for us to live with the normal imperfections of people, especially those we love? Why is it such a punitive spirit toward the blind spots, imperfections and failures we all experience become such a dominant spirit between generations?
I’d prefer the company of a selfish rake, with some relationship to the real world, to that an emotionally fragile mean girl any day of the week. Especially when that mean girl chose to wound her own family in service of her narcissism and neuroticism, pretending it was enlightened morality to wield the knife against her loved ones, whatever their failings.
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