the hypocrite
Sophia spends her 17th summer with her father in the Sicilian sun, typing his next book as he dictates it to her. Sophia spends her 27th summer with her mother and her opinions, on the theatre’s rooftop bar, where a few flights below, actors are performing her new play. On the stage, actors show a mangled report of the events which passed 10 years prior, whipped into sharp peaks and served on a silver platter to her silver father, who grows very uncomfortable in his plush red chair.
Daddy issues by the Italian coast? Signed up immediately!
And topped with a cast of cultured Londoners, social conscious critics, and women who have suffered the insufferable: the revolutionary, the angry, the explicit, the fatherly, male author.
I so enjoy a fast pace. Three timelines shouting over each other like strung-out gamer boys testing out noise-cancelling headphones in a silent room. Quick vignettes laced together with a cutting kind of psychological poison: perspective. And Jo Hamya yields it so so so well!!!
So, there’s a great conversation going on across the characters and through time about feminism, treatment of women, wives, daughters, lovers, etc etc. What’s brilliant is the angles at which Hamya has examined the subjects far outdo the time she’s had to examine them in.
And that’s what makes a great read!
It’s like… refreshing! SIP! Thank you Mrs Author for giving me a droolingly satisfying click of building blocks, little thoughts and moments that lock into place click clack until they form the true picture of a family. And for doing it – for the most part – with a sweet kind of subtlety and respect!
Did you know I don’t like it when people treat me like I’m a silly child (I like it when I treat me like a silly child). We want authors to think we’re smart! I want them to think: ‘here reader, I well and truly can’t be bothered to painfully spell out the rest of my emotional diatribe, and you’re quick enough to avoid the effort’.
Hamya slips perspective in cleverly, spreading the poison out for a clean swipe. No character escapes Hamya’s judgment, and none is without her sympathy. It’s a satirical take on incompatible memories of the same summer. They’re all unlikeable and they’re all right in their own way: The maybe-marxist show critic. The uninterested mother. The father with artistic integrity.
The problems themselves are in some way, not worth reading a book about. Nothing revolutionary. The relationships between each character are obvious. No one did anything truly that bad.
But they’ve been slowly grating at each other’s perspectives and personal truths for decades. And that’s the book.
For those who have read the book, or vaguely understood the plot I laid out, here’s my interpretation of the battle of perspectives in this book, when it comes to feminism:
Notorious daddy author writes about women crudely and smally. EW! That didn’t age well and neither did you bald old man! But how could his own daughter thinks he wouldn’t be a FEMINIST?? He writes about women all the time! He looooovess women. He loves women. He loves his daughter. He always tried to be a good father.
Daughter playwright is disgusted by her father’s works and by his MANLY MAN attitude. Daughter plays the part of a silent quiet shy girl in life but is also a petty woman with access to twitter. She uses the simple theatrics of sex, to turn his bad bad cancelled books into a pathetic picture for a full house.
Young media-trained audience of Uniqlo-sporting screen-addicts see her show as a great opportunity to FINALLY CANCEL SOMEONE. To feel better than others. To use their newly learnt words! Amplify non-white voices they cry!
Daughter is, after all, yanking space out of the hands of artists more deserving; minorities who have had to fight more than the rich white daughter of a complicated and self-important man. Why should SHE get to put on a play??
Daddy author says they’re just being performative, parroting the online space with no real stake in the matter.
Divorce-mama-England-ironing-queen-goddess-of-drunken-domesticity,doesn’t listen to anyone but herself because mothers are always right that’s the one thing she got from the divorce (the right to be right always). She thinks her daughter’s disgust towards her father is so so silly, beneath her, TEDIOUS! She does not like her daughter’s societally-fuelled anger, at his sexism, at his works. She demands her daughter’s anger for his everyday misgivings, for his laziness, his domestic shortcomings, the ways manhood affects the woman right next to him, every single day. I get her.
And so it goes we build a pretty little picture, quickly enough for me to finish reading before my weekend at the Olympics is well and over (I now have nothing it read on the train back). And in the end, I think every single one of them is right, but the dad is the least right. And that’s ok, says Hamya.
I pronounce Jo Hamya a master of perspective.
if you enjoyed the hypocrite you might enjoy:
on chesil beach
Ian McEwan
hot milk
Deborah Levy