The Hypocrite

Hamya’s provocative second novel (after Three Rooms) lays bare a family’s fraught relationships over the course of an afternoon at the theater. Sophia’s father, a successful novelist, attends a matinee performance of her play, having no idea until it begins that it’s about him. The play recounts a summer holiday in Sicily a decade earlier, when Sophia was 17 and her father insisted she take dictation for the novel he was writing. In flashbacks from Sophia’s point of view, she reveals her disgust with her father’s misogynistic writing and his philandering, which she dramatizes on stage—in one scene, the character based on her father has sex with a woman in the kitchen of the place where he is staying with his daughter. During intermission, Sophia’s father overhears a fellow audience member call the play “social justice for the upper middle class,” which prompts him to come to Sophia’s defense. During the performance, Sophia has lunch with her mother, who divorced Sophia’s father years earlier and who claims her marital duties were a mix of “companionship and coddling.” None of the characters escape Hamya’s bemused and excoriating view, nor are there any easy answers to the questions raised about expressions of gender and privilege in art. Fans of Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren ought to take note. (Aug.)