THE HYPOCRITE

A controversial 60-something novelist finds the tables turned when his daughter writes a scathing play about their Italian holiday years earlier.

One writer in the family is unfortunate, two make for catastrophe: That’s one takeaway from this sophomore novel by the author of Three Rooms (2021). Sophia’s father (who’s never named) attends a matinee performance of his daughter’s play at a London theater. Upstairs, Sophia and her mother—long divorced from her father but recently pulled back into his orbit by the pandemic—eat lunch in the rooftop restaurant, edgily awaiting his reaction. Downstairs, he’s outraged to discover that the play is based on a vacation he took with teenage Sophia, during which she served as his amanuensis, sulkily bristling at his dictation by day (“He’d never said please for the duration of their work together”) and overhearing his casual sexual encounters by night. As Sophia’s father sits in the audience cringing at her portrayal of him (“He wonders what he’s done to be so abysmally misunderstood by the most important person in his life”), he must acknowledge that her play is brilliant: “It’s like the novel Sophia helped him write, but better.…He’d spent 400 pages anatomising three centuries’ worth of the English novel against his generation’s attitudes to sex, and here she is, neatly holding just one of his books against the entirety of her generation’s values.” Gender roles, generation gaps, the nature of genius: Hamya explores big ideas but is at her best offering precise observations; a sly coda strikingly reframes the drama of Sophia and her father. And who, exactly, is the hypocrite of the title?

A biting novel of art, inheritance, and evolving mores.