Social Justice for the Upper Middle Class?

Irene Katz Connelly reviews Jo Hamya’s novel “The Hypocrite.”

By Irene Katz ConnellyAugust 14, 2024

• Fiction

WHEN THE AGING, unnamed novelist at the center of British author Jo Hamya’s sophomore novel The Hypocrite (2024) sits down to watch his 28-year-old daughter Sophia’s play, he immediately recognizes the set. The rustic onstage kitchen, complete with checkered tiles and portraits of saints, vividly recalls the house on an idyllic Aeolian island where, 10 years earlier, he spent a summer with the then-teenage Sophia. The marble table has been carefully scattered with papers and other detritus from the comedic novel about the failures of the sexual revolution that he had dictated to his daughter during that vacation; the lead actor wears a perfect copy of one of the novelist’s own shirts.

At first, the novelist is touched by Sophia’s scrupulous reconstruction of the house. Divorced since her childhood, he remembers the trip as a rare moment of competent fatherhood and a chance to collaborate with a daughter finally old enough to engage with his work. For him, the sight of the set conjures gentle, paternal memories, such as “the clack of keys as she transmitted his cadence into a machine,” or the “soft glide of his pencil correcting her more creative decisions.”

Sophia, however, has directed a different story. The lead actor? He stumbles drunkenly onstage, locked in a prolonged and caricatural embrace with a woman who looks disturbingly similar to a local the novelist really did seduce on the island. What unfolds atop those checkered tiles is the opposite of a paean to the novelist’s parenting: it’s a piercing parody of his chronic womanizing and the chauvinist attitudes informing his fiction. Appalled by what he sees as a gross distortion, the novelist nevertheless has to concede the main facts (“now that he thinks of it, he had brought a handful of women back to the house”), and the gulf between his stated memories and these frequent slips primes the reader to side with Sophia, even as her reasons for correcting the record in such a painfully public fashion remain, at the outset, unclear.

The Hypocrite opens as a straightforward (albeit biting) satire targeting both the novelist’s failures as a parent and the casual (albeit insidious) misogyny of his generation. The present action takes place in the few hours during which the play runs its course, and the novel switches perspectives with Victorian omniscience—toggling mostly between Sophia and her father while also giving airtime to her mother, another audience member, and a bit player from the now infamous decades-old vacation. Seemingly tangential to the plot, this fleet of secondary characters ultimately proves crucial to Hamya’s project, contesting Sophia’s righteous framing of her own experience and interrogating the novel’s central art objects: the father’s books, which delight in mocking people and public mores, and his daughter’s play, which is often blinkered by its own moral certitude. Through these querulous, contradictory voices, Hamya suggests that both Sophia and her father deserve the titular label of “hypocrite” and maps out a third artistic path—one in which no character's judgments go completely unchallenged.

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Hamya’s curtain lifts on a swanky London theater in August 2020. For most readers, that date will recall the summer of reckoning with police brutality that followed the devastating murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It’s no coincidence that The Hypocrite takes place at a moment when the manifold hypocrisies of Western law enforcement and many civic institutions were facing much-deserved scrutiny. But the novel’s well-heeled theatergoers seem unperturbed by protests in North American cities, or by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign unfolding closer to home, or by the viral clips of a man who, pinned to the ground by multiple officers, gasps again and again: I can’t breathe. Instead, freed at last from national lockdowns, the Brits in question appear more focused on restoring as much of the status quo as possible without (fully) lowering their masks.

Hamya’s descriptive style recalls a roving documentary camera. “You keep moving. More slender lines of corridor,” she writes in an initial description of the theater. “Back here, things flicker at you as you pass.” Her main characters share a detached, lightly ironic voice that excels at making everyday mannerisms seem surreal and disturbing (“They take off their masks and become plastic,” Sophia’s father observes of the millennials snapping photos of each other in the theater lobby), and this brittle irony only occasionally trips over its own intelligence.

To Sophia’s father—who, over a long but now foundering career, appears to have produced something resembling the oeuvre of Philip Roth in the era of Martin Amis—the play’s reimagined trip to Italy feels especially poignant given the professional slights he has suffered in the decade since. In an era unsympathetic to his brand of roguish chauvinism, the novelist’s work has fallen from fashion, the best prizes have passed him over, and fawning interviews have given way to Twitter controversies regarding his off-color bon mots (“Suddenly the whole world thought he was a misogynist, that he was against the gays,” he sighs ruefully). Sitting in the theater, the novelist can see that he has left the heights of fame behind for good.

For her part, Sophia remembers long sessions hunched over a laptop, laboriously typing out dictated chapters of a novel about crude men treating women terribly. She can’t help but connect the “particular whine” with which the novelist intones the lines of female characters to the nighttime trysts he barely tries to conceal from her. This unprecedented period of time alone with her father has made Sophia feel distinctly “not special” and has impressed her with the capricious nature of her father’s love: “The revelation that her father somehow anointed her with a daily sense of importance had come to her only through its withdrawal.”

The novelist’s neglect has more tangible consequences as well. To absolve himself from spending time with Sophia, he pushes her toward their housekeeper’s older nephew, Anto. Naturally, because Anto provides some much-needed attention, Sophia strives to impress him, telling him she’s writing a novel whose plot she cribs wholesale from her father’s. But Anto is a walking red flag—his constant desire for oral sex is only matched by his refusal to reciprocate—and Sophia has no one to remind her that she’s worthy of respect, much less help her disentangle herself from the situation. And when the novelist learns about her fake book, he humiliates her in front of Anto, siding with the brash man who is reminiscent of his younger self over the daughter whose plight—so similar to those of the women in his books—he can’t quite take seriously.

Such damning memories justify Sophia’s ruthless parody, as the play depicts her father engaged in increasingly grotesque rounds of simulated sex with a carousel of younger lovers. (At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what happens; it’s hard to render theater in prose, and this play never comes into perfect focus.) The play doesn’t just give voice to her personal grievances: Sophia positions her work, which derives its authority from completely inhabiting the perspective of the wronged daughter, as a definitive rebuttal to the slick callousness of the 20th-century male literati. But when it comes to making sweeping statements on social mores, she may be more like her father than she would like to admit.

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As the show goes on, other characters crop up to contest Sophia’s staged rewriting of her Aeolian summer. One of these is Sophia’s mother, with whom the playwright shares an awkward lunch in the theater café while the novelist white-knuckles his way through thespian ambush. (Hamya never explains why Sophia thought this was a good idea.) Too well-acquainted with her ex-husband’s faults to feel much sympathy for him, she nevertheless feels left out by the literary tussle between father and daughter. After all, Sophia’s tale of wholesale abandonment completely elides her mother’s diligent parenting. “It’s not very feminist,” she quips, “to write an entire play about your absent father.” By measuring herself exclusively against her father, her mother suggests, Sophia is displaying an inherited disdain for the woman who raised her—and seeking, not to differentiate herself from the novelist, but rather to prove herself his artistic heir apparent.

Reeling out of the theater at intermission, the novelist meets an earnestly progressive young woman he dubs Round Glasses, much as previous generations of male luminaries dismissed inconvenient female intellectuals as bluestockings. Round Glasses immediately informs the novelist that she dislikes both his books and his daughter’s play, which she dismisses as “smug, obvious white feminism.” To her, Sophia’s drama of “social justice for the upper middle class” is diverting attention and funding from other, more socially valuable stories—all while its author has the effrontery to live alone in a well-located two-bedroom apartment.

The least realized character among The Hypocrite’s spare cast, Round Glasses reads less like an actual leftist than like a robot programmed to arouse baby boomer ire. But while her pronouncements about whose work deserves to be staged are easy to dismiss, Hamya uses Round Glasses to expose a different weakness in Sophia’s play: perfect narrators are rare, and narrators who stay perfect in the eyes of successive generations are even rarer. Sophia is neither, and her play’s success depends on the audience perceiving her to be right and her father wrong. Art that derives its authority from morally unimpeachable characters, Round Glasses argues inadvertently, is especially vulnerable to critique when future generations realize that those characters aren’t so unimpeachable after all—all the more so in a moment when many are (rightly!) becoming newly cognizant of their own biases and striving toward more enlightened values. Sophia’s father enjoyed decades of acclaim before becoming unfashionable; his daughter, this encounter implies, may have a much shorter period in the sun before facing similar scrutiny.

While Round Glasses serves as a useful straw woman, the novel’s final speaker poses the most serious threat to Sophia’s narrative. In an ambitious last chapter, Hamya delves a decade into the past, writing from the perspective of Elena, Anto’s aunt and the housekeeper who cares for Sophia and the novelist during the trip that began it all. This swerve in time and focus is less kooky than it seems; while the novel’s other voices sometimes fall slack, Elena is emphatic and commanding in expressing her distaste for both father and daughter: “They were lazy, messy people,” she pronounces decisively, scouring the kitchen after their final departure. “She had watched them for a month, idling around the house, declaiming things at each other, never bothering to make her job easier.” The novelist at least tries to be polite, thanking Elena effusively for her work and chatting while she cooks. Sophia simply treats her like a servant. “What she had first taken for shyness became rudeness in contrast with Sophia’s father’s pleasant way of being,” Elena reflects. To her, the novelist and his daughter exhibit similar flaws—except that Sophia behaves worse than her father.

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Though never center stage, the voices of Sophia’s mother, Round Glasses, and Elena offer a dissenting chorus, subjecting Sophia’s work to the same satirical criticisms and reevaluations that she has applied to her father’s. This parody of the way one legitimate grievance easily supplants another can be read as an indictment of “cancel culture.” Yet The Hypocrite is far from arguing that luminaries of the past—whether the novelist with his petty sins or Cecil Rhodes with his exponentially graver ones—ought to remain on their pedestals unquestioned, just because the critics aren’t perfect themselves. Instead, the layered narratives gradually create a collective moral clarity that transcends any individual perspective.

Take Elena. Her place at the novel’s end and her status as a worker overlooked by this insular family positions her as a definitive expert on Sophia’s character. But her monologue reveals that many of her opinions are based on information from her spurned nephew—“She has ideas about herself, had been Anto’s verdict”—who can hardly be counted as an impartial observer. This significant error in judgment alerts the reader to smaller misinterpretations. In her own flashbacks, Sophia recalls feeling unaccustomed to having a housekeeper and consequently acts awkwardly around Elena, whereas her father’s easy charm reflects his comfort with the arrangement. It’s no coincidence that Elena’s narrative undermines itself even faster than Round Glasses punctures Sophia’s: though the housekeeper is perfectly justified in her antipathy towards this family, her explicitly less-than-sound reasoning prevents her verdict from emerging as absolute.

In fact, Hamya’s deft last act offers readers the opportunity to view Sophia as an entitled child, a wounded daughter, and a flawed future artist all at once—a messy yet crucial complexity that the novelist’s books and Sophia’s play both lack. Elena’s pronouncements don’t carry weight because she’s more virtuous than father and daughter but because she provides a particularly important gloss on the story, at once unraveling what has come before and making sense of the novel’s tangled threads.

So, what to do when the lights come up? What about the novelist, who emerges from the theater harrowed and embarrassed yet not particularly repentant? Hamya allows a tentative reconciliation: the process of confronting her father makes Sophia so overwrought that the novelist reclaims some of his paternal authority by comforting her. But no real change of heart occurs, and this happy ending is a private one. As in many families, father and daughter choose to overlook real and perceived misdeeds in favor of maintaining a relationship.

The grievances posed by the novel’s secondary characters can’t be addressed through these familial mechanisms, and Hamya provides no instructions on how they might weave their contradictory memories into a shared narrative. 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.