Harrowing Comeuppance in Jo Hamya's "The Hypocrite"

By Madeline Schultz on August 22, 2024

Imagine you find yourself in a theater, waiting to see a play a loved one wrote. The lights dim, the audience quiets, and the rouge curtain pulls to the side to show… you. Not just you, but you in your worst light. You behaving in ways that are uncomfortable, unacceptable, and inappropriate. So begins Jo Hamya's The Hypocrite.

Beginning in a theater in 2020 London, we follow the otherwise-unnamed father of Sophia as he sits to watch his daughter's play, quickly discovering that it is a play entirely about him and their month-long vacation to Sicily when Sophia was seventeen. Alternating from the present moment to the Sicily trip, we experience Sophia's recounting of her Italian summer, one that is clearly far more negative than how her father remembers it. In the present, we see Sophia's father sit in horror, trapped in a theater and forced to watch all his wrongdoings on a stage, while Sophia anxiously has lunch with her mother, waiting to meet with her father after the play.

While this book would be easy to sum up as a daddy issues book, that would only serve to discount Hamya's immaculate character crafting. Sophia's father is the quintessential ignorant middle-aged white man; he is sexist, self-absorbed, and entirely blind to his own shortcomings. Sophia's mother is a stereotypical jaded and bitter divorcée, hating her ex-husband while still feeling the need to help him in his times of need. And Sophia is your typical innocent teenager caught in the storm of two narcissistic parents. Despite each of them being clichés, Hamya brings a uniqueness to their stories by how they recount the same events. Each of them cannot see the damage they have inflicted on one another, and this becomes more and more evident as we alternate between Sicily and London.

Sophia's father's biggest sin to me seemed to be his lack of ability to recognize Sophia as a person, not just his daughter. He frames the trip to Sicily as a father-daughter bonding trip, only for it to become a trip where he forces Sophia to type out his novel for him, and at all other moments ignores her in favor of trysts in town. Sophia feels neglected, used, and overlooked in every way that mattered to her. Even her father's nickname for her, "Cherub," is indicative of this inability to see her as anything but his child, not someone to engage with in an adult fashion. Insult is added to injury when the book that her father is writing is also offensive to her, framing women and sexuality in a way that her father finds funny and that she finds sexist and derogatory.

Sophia's response to this comes ten years later, in the form of a hotly reviewed and successful play that she invites her father to come see, giving no prior warning to him about the contents on the stage. This, to me, was the central question of The Hypocrite: is the idea of turning the other cheek, taking the high road, or whatever you want to call it, dated? Is it appropriate to hit back in a public, deliberately humiliating way to those who hurt us, especially when we believe they had it coming? Sophia certainly succeeded in making her father feel awful, but it became clear in the end that she did not succeed in making herself feel any better. There was no catharsis in knowing her father was watching her play, only a plague of anxiety and guilt.

Of course there is something to be argued about the bravery that it takes for writers to feature real people they know in their work, unable to hide behind the genre of fiction whilst calling out those who have wronged them. Memoirists and essayists face this all the time, choosing whether or not to use pseudonyms and whether or not to sugarcoat that one memory that shows an individual at their worst. In some ways, Sophia being able to take her pain and make it into art is something to be admired, and one could say that her father, as the title suggests, has no right to be upset.

Still, it was incredibly difficult for me as a reader to watch Sophia's father go through that experience. It was nearly impossible not to empathize with him, thinking of how I would feel in that moment, regardless of whether I was a bad person or not. This was driven home by how truly clueless her father was to his transgressions; Hamya, from Sophia's father's point of view, tells us how he used to give her books to talk about and made a point to remember her friends and the stories she'd tell, as well as include her in on his work. It's hard not to ask why Sophia chose time and time again for years (or however long it took for her to conceive, write, and stage the play) to go the route of ultimate relational destruction, rather than attempt a conversation.

Whether Hamya was making an argument for being merciless in response to narcissists for the sake of your truth (for staging the play), or that choosing a public battleground for personal battles will only leave more carnage on both sides (against staging the play), I was engrossed in this father-daughter duel from the first page to the very last. 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.