What happens when we stop idolising the generations above us? Stop idolising our own parents?
What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children?
The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father in Sicily. There she falls in love for the first time. There she works as her father’s amanuensis, typing the novel he dictates, a story about sex and gender divides. There, their relationship fractures.
London, Summer 2020. Sophia’s father, a 61-year-old novelist who does not feel himself to be a bad or outdated person sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter’s first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday is its subject. A play that will force him to watch his purported crimes play out in front of him.
What happens when we become frightened of the generations below us? Frightened of our own children?
The Aeolian islands, 2010. Sophia, on the cusp of adulthood, spends a long hot summer with her father in Sicily. There she falls in love for the first time. There she works as her father’s amanuensis, typing the novel he dictates, a story about sex and gender divides. There, their relationship fractures.
London, Summer 2020. Sophia’s father, a 61-year-old novelist who does not feel himself to be a bad or outdated person sits in a large theatre, surrounded by strangers, watching his daughter’s first play. A play that takes that Sicilian holiday is its subject. A play that will force him to watch his purported crimes play out in front of him.
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Reviews
An even-handed cultural satire targeting social media-powered morality in the twenty-first century. Written with cool precision as well as barely veiled glee, it confirms Hamya as one of the sharpest new writers around.
An intense, onrushing, highly pressurized book, best experienced in a single sitting, like a play
The Hypocrite is engrossing, acerbic and elegantly executed. Jo Hamya artfully reveals her characters' flaws and vulnerabilities with humour, wit and style
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
I thought The Hypocrite was brilliant. Thrilling and unpredictable, 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
A funny, painful and poignant picture, looking at the subjective natures of memory and writing and the humiliation of being observed.
Sharp and agile...Hamya's staging is savvy; each scene is packed with implication and, often, wit
The Hypocrite is a brooding, taut novel
A darkly comic family drama that keeps us guessing right up to the end . . . Hamya's prose is crisp and fluid
Ingenious . . . 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
A sharp, insightful read
An astute, funny-sad analysis of power, perception and memory that questions the value of art and the responsibilities - and egos - of those who make it
The plot moves with a smooth economy, brilliantly satirising all kinds of pretension, while offering psychological insights
I loved Jo Hamya's elegantly plotted and wickedly funny The Hypocrite. A perfect and perfectly merciless novel
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
[A] clever study of art, dysfunction and generational difference . . . a well-wrought and very clever book
Hamya writes with real wit. 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
A taut, poised portrait of a father-daughter relationship and the attitudinal clash between generations
Caustically funny
I relished the original emotional pulse of The Hypocrite, a compulsive tale of a reckoning with memory and responsibility played out in real time
Sharp, witty and astute about parents and children, but never cruel; I enjoyed it hugely
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
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
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