August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father's verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven't aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might hope, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. The play has been met with rave reviews but Sophia's father has studiously avoided reading any of them. But when the house lights dim, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of men of his generation.
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.
