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Jo Hamya’s novel “The Hypocrite” follows a famous English novelist as he watches a new play by his daughter, Sophia, in London. The lights go down in the theater, and immediately the novelist realizes: The play is about him, the vacation he took with Sophia a decade earlier and the sins he committed while they were away. During the show, Sophia is at lunch with her mother, dissecting their family history until she can talk with her father after the play has concluded. The story also jumps to the past, to show what really happened on that fateful father-daughter holiday.
The novel is an art monster story and a dysfunctional family saga that explores the ethics of creating work inspired by real life. In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Joumana Khatib (who wrote our review) and Lauren Christensen.
They also discuss comments and questions that readers submitted. If you’ve read “The Hypocrite” and want to join the conversation, we’d love to hear your reactions in the comments. We’ll get you started:
Joumana Khatib: “Something I always love to see in a novel is a well-put-together and constructed story. And that’s something we can get into about ‘The Hypocrite.’ I also thought this was terrifically funny. I loved that she was really writing into an ambiguous kind of moral vacuum — which, of course, this is a MeToo book. This is a post-pandemic book. It’s definitely a product of the time in which it was written. And yet it was not an easy black-and-white hero, villain, whatever kind of story. She was incredibly delicate in how she wrote all the characters.”
Lauren Christensen: “I think calling it — yes, of course it’s a MeToo story, but in a lot of ways it’s a post-MeToo story, right? It is taking a huge, cultural global movement and responding to it in this very micro, very granular way. And engaging with questions that we all talk about and think about, of the ethics of autofiction and to what extent does calling something a work of art give you license to potentially hurt people who are real and living and breathing and might even love you.”
MJ Franklin: “I also loved this book for all the reasons that you’re mentioning. For me, the superpower of this book is that it’s juggling so much so seamlessly. Again, it’s a MeToo book. It’s a family saga. It’s about art. And it’s about the ethics of creating art from life, but also it’s about the ethics of creating art in life. So much of what especially this father is doing is hurting his family in ways that he doesn’t even realize because he’s so consumed with the process of making his art.”
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].
The post Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘The Hypocrite’ appeared first on New York Times.
