Among an author’s most dreaded readers, their parents rank perhaps most highly. Megan Nolan once stated that her main fear is not “scornful strangers” but “subjecting” her parents to her fiction; while RO Kwon insists she would keep her books away “from all kin” if she could. In Jo Hamya’s well-aimed second novel, The Hypocrite, a young woman’s writing broaches decades-old conversations that push her family relationships to ruin’s edge. At its centre, a chauvinistic, middle-aged male novelist is publicly lampooned by his own daughter.
The work in question – a play by 27-year-old Sophia – revisits a trip with her father to a family friend’s holiday home in Sicily’s Aeolian Islands. The father attends a matinee performance (fatefully ignorant of its subject) and the novel slips back and forth between his account of this experience and a tense lunch in which Sophia and her mother dredge up marital resentments and their various recollections of the events portrayed in the play. Through this roving narration, Hamya gently teases out chasms and contradictions between each character’s memories.
