Falls into the category of #MeToo novels, a label that presumes a perspective that Hamya plays with adroitly ... A brilliant litmus test of a novel, which doesn’t mean it’s indecisive or wavering ... Hamya successfully makes a muddle with The Hypocrite, and I mean that as high praise. Contemporary fiction too often seeks the relief of some imagined perfect morality, perhaps because so many readers now conflate the beliefs of characters and their creator. It’s a pleasure to read a 27-year-old writer who embraces the novel’s power to fog up certainties about 'bad men'—and prods readers to join in.
Impressive ... Glides among time frames and points of view ... Formal complexity is what elevates The Hypocrite from a straightforward novel of prosecution and rebuttal ... Is instead invested in the phenomenon of subjectivity, portraying a world of mutual self-involvement in which people are not only driven but tragically blinded by their individual truths. As such, The Hypocrite elevates style above argument, and its pleasures are in the swift, agile way that Ms. Hamya flits between the characters’ thoughts and the past and present.
Sharp and agile ... Thankfully, nobody in this appropriately claustrophobic story emerges the clear hero ... In less capable hands, the novel might have become a tiresome examination of how sexual mores evolve between generations, or a flimsy inversion of Oedipal myth ... Overall, Hamya’s staging is savvy; each scene is packed with implication and, often, wit.
Rather than assigning a particular voice to each character, Hamya deploys a fluid prose style, toggling between participants as emotional states become unglued. What is real, what is imagined, what is performed: In Hamya’s confident hands, it all becomes productively confused. The result is a novel about how writers attempt to mediate their lives through art, and the necessarily incomplete nature of that attempt ... There is both more and less nuance in The Hypocrite than that description implies. At its best—and this novel is largely very good — it operates in a zone of dissonance and uncertainty, in which complete but irreconcilable perspectives clash ... suffers when it occasionally wanders beyond its walls to comment on The Way We Live Now. All the references to masks and distancing protocols turn a historic pandemic into mere window dressing ... When it tethers itself to the behaviors and terminology of our immediate past, the book falters; but when Hamya allows her characters to live, breathe, spit and snarl, her fiction soars.
Hamya’s prose is crisp and fluid ... The author’s main target here is the gaping chasm between the generations and the ways in which living in the internet age is accelerating those age-old differences.
The various timelines run smoothly ... Hamya’s defensive impulse is understandable – this is a book about the genteel violence at the heart of the bourgeois family and the novel’s engine is the artistic representation of holidays in Italy – but it might work better to own the situation, rather than simultaneously pre-empting and satirising generational difference ... If you find sufficient pleasure in satire and meta-narrative to dispense with old-fashioned relationships with characters, and are not put off by a Hampstead sex romp via holidays in Italy, this is a well-wrought and very clever book.
Well-aimed ... Through this roving narration, Hamya gently teases out chasms and contradictions between each character’s memories ... With this artful construct, Hamya sets the stage for generational gripes and grudges to run riot ... Hamya is exacting in her use of flint-sharp images.
I have rarely underlined so many passages in a book ... Hamya’s writing is tightly wound, and continually constricting: no one escapes her judgement. There is empathy amid the cool critique ... Offers forensic and pitiless insights into an embodied generation gap – everyone believing they’re in the right; everyone, of course, still getting things wrong.
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 ... 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.
The Hypocrite opens as a straightforward (albeit biting) satire targeting both the novelist’s failures as a parent and the casual (albeit insidious) misogyny of his generation ... Seemingly tangential to the plot, this fleet of secondary characters ultimately proves crucial to Hamya’s project, contesting Sophia’s righteous framing of her own experience and interrogating the novel’s central art objects: the father’s books, which delight in mocking people and public mores, and his daughter’s play, which is often blinkered by its own moral certitude ... The least realized character among The Hypocrite’s spare cast, Round Glasses reads less like an actual leftist than like a robot programmed to arouse baby boomer ire. But while her pronouncements about whose work deserves to be staged are easy to dismiss, Hamya uses Round Glasses to expose a different weakness in Sophia’s play: perfect narrators are rare, and narrators who stay perfect in the eyes of successive generations are even rarer ... Hamya’s deft last act offers readers the opportunity to view Sophia as an entitled child, a wounded daughter, and a flawed future artist all at once—a messy yet crucial complexity that the novelist’s books and Sophia’s play both lack.
An impeccable rendering of familiar and familial pain, the hurts those closest can inflict, even when the harm is unintended or goes completely unnoticed.
Provocative ... 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.
