Sophia's new play is being performed, and her father, a novelist, is in the audience for the first time. The play is set in the house where he and Sophia once stayed in Sicily, and as he watches the opening scenes, "Sophia's father leans forward. It's not what he thought." With those terse words, Jo Hamya (Three Rooms) underlines the tension of The Hypocrite, which threads between the unsettling theater performance and the years-earlier vacation, needling under the skin of this fraught and faltering father-daughter relationship.
Hamya writes beautiful sentences, showing off impeccable descriptions: "on a small white boat that rocked like a bell towards a catalogue of blistered cliff faces." The Hypocrite also asks excellent questions about race and class. It offers much to think about regarding being a writer, creating worlds from memory and imagination, and how that affects all parties potentially involved. And through flashes of Sophia as a younger woman, it becomes clear that the vacation depicted in the play left more marks than are shown on stage, especially regarding how Sophia viewed herself and her agency.
At its heart, though, this is a novel about familiar and familial pain, the hurts those closest can inflict, even when the harm is unintended or goes unnoticed. And it packs a punch, despite its small size. Hamya calls into question the version of masculinity performed by Sophia's father, but she doesn't completely negate him, rendering his embarrassment and confusion beautifully. Similarly, she reveals Sophia's anguish even as she doesn't quite excuse her, leaving readers to wonder exactly which hypocrite is named in the title. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian