A playwright gets back at her dad onstage in ‘The Hypocrite’
A man sits in a theater and watches his life acted out onstage. Though he is a famous writer, it is not his play; though it is his life, he cannot control the outcome. He writhes in his seat, wants to stand up and make his voice heard, correct the record. But the audience is already against him. The tide has turned; they’ve come for the performance, not the truth. His time has already passed.
Such is the fate of all writers. They create their work in one era, and if it is any good it might be read in others, and not always for the better. This disjuncture – between what we believe we have created, and how others receive and respond to it – is at the heart of Jo Hamya’s second novel, “The Hypocrite.”
The writer in question is an unnamed, 60-something Martin Amis type, a provocative, ironic vanquisher of moral and sexual norms, now long past his heyday. Once known for “caustically quotable remarks made over free drinks,” he hasn’t published a novel in many years. When he does pop back up in the news, it is thanks only to those same remarks, which now make people furious.
Yet he does not realize how fully irrelevant his voice has become. It is August 2020, and his daughter Sophia is premiering her new play between early waves of COVID. The play concerns a trip to Sicily that she and her father took a decade earlier, when she was about to enter university and he was completing his last novel. Her father remembers a sunbaked period of harmonious collaboration, but Sophia, as reflected in her play, experienced it as a time of creative tyranny and sexual exposure. Sitting in the audience, the father watches as a man dressed in one of his favorite shirts loudly beds a series of women and then tries to make them type up his novel. These women grow older and more defiant, until he is being openly mocked by an actress the age of his ex-wife. Around him, the masked crowd squirms, cackles and sneers. His degradation has become their triumph.
“The Hypocrite” hops between the day of the performance and the trip that inspired it, and gives us the perspectives of Sophia and her parents. Rather than assigning a particular voice to each character, Hamya deploys a fluid prose style, toggling between participants as emotional states become unglued. What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya’s confident hands, it all becomes productively confused.
The result is a novel about how writers attempt to mediate their lives through art, and the necessarily incomplete nature of that attempt. These gaps are manifold: between generations, genders, art forms and political dispositions. But Hamya is most interested in the gulf between how we understand ourselves and how others perceive us. Sophia believes herself a victim of her heedless, domineering father; watching the play, her father sees himself as a convenient target for an era of moral scolds. In an interview with the Guardian this year, Hamya said this novel is meant to inhabit “one massive grey area,” where “both parties (are) wrong and they (are) both utterly sympathetic.”
There is more and less nuance in “The Hypocrite” than that description implies. At its best – and this novel is largely very good – it operates in a zone of dissonance and uncertainty, in which complete but irreconcilable perspectives clash. Hamya is keen on the father’s arrogant lapses and self-serving justifications, but she does not sell his emotions short. His hurt, his outrage and his alienation from contemporary mores are rendered empathetically, if often skeptically. And though not as fully drawn as her father, Sophia pushes through his indignant responses without either condemning or forgiving him. Her play does not come across as cruel. It wounds because she is wounded.
The theater is a perfect setting for Hamya. She is a natural dramaturge, enacting her themes through this central relationship. But “The Hypocrite” suffers when it occasionally wanders beyond its walls to comment on The Way We Live Now. All the references to masks and distancing protocols turn a historic pandemic into mere window dressing. And in one particularly heavy-handed moment, during an intermission in the play, the father has a heated conversation with another audience member, “a white woman, wearing Carhartt overalls and pristine Birkenstocks beneath her punky haircut”; he calls her Round Glasses. Speaking in pure, undigested jargon, Round Glasses condemns his work as sexist and his daughter’s as “smug, obvious white feminism that feeds itself to its audience with a silver spoon.” He calls her thoughts “facile,” and the two trade barbs that allow Hamya to quickly (and reductively) capture generational conflicts and sensitivities.
The novel moves on, and Round Glasses does not return. But her cartoonish, purely polemical presence lingers. It comes across as petty, self-protective and beneath the novel Hamya has otherwise constructed. People might speak on occasion like Round Glasses does, but simply reiterating their rhetoric to mock them isn’t enough. The concerns of any given moment tend to perish, but enlivened by an author’s curious, expansive mind, they stand a chance of living on. “The Hypocrite” gets a good part of the way there. When it tethers itself to the behaviors and terminology of our immediate past, the book falters; but when Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars.
Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.