‘The Hypocrite’ by Jo Hamya     (2024)  –  230 pages

In ‘The Hypocrite’, an unnamed successful novelist is in a theater to watch his daughter Sofia’s stage play. He is surprised to find out that the play is about him. The play takes place in a vacation house in Sicily where Sofia stayed with her father for a month ten years earlier when Sofia was then only 17 and had just graduated from high school. The father had been divorced from her mother for a long time.

While his daughter was in Sicily, he had dictated the novel he was writing to her, and she had to write it all down. When they weren’t working on his novel, he persuaded her to spend time with this questionable young guy Anto who was always pushing her head down. Meanwhile the father is going out every night, picking up women, and bringing them back to the house after the daughter had supposedly gone to sleep.

The play is a broad sex comedy with the father bringing several women back to the Sicilian house to have sex with them. The audience is all laughing at this guy’s antics. The father admits that the play is well written but he is offended, because the play is obviously ridiculing him.

“He wonders what he’s done to have become so abysmally misunderstood by the most important person in his life. He does not know how to fix it.”

While the father is watching the play, Sofia and her mother are in a restaurant near the theater.

Later the father confronts his daughter about her play, and she answers:

“You had me write that shitty book, and then instead of talking to me about it, or spending time with me, you made me listen to you having sex with different women every night – did it ever occur to you to at least try acting like a parent?”

Later Sofia discusses her play with her therapist whose reaction is:

“And in this case, Marlene says carefully, you’ve constructed an arrangement where an audience can laugh with you about your father.”

I thought this scenario, a father watching his daughter’s play, finding out it is about him, and is greatly offended was a great idea for a novel. However I found the execution of it somewhat lacking in precision and sharpness. For one thing, an excellent opportunity was missed with the play he is watching. A few lines from the play are quoted, but none of these lines are connected to a scene in the play or might have offended the father. Instead we find out little about the play beyond that it is a broad physical sex comedy. Instead there could have been many witty lines in the play which the father might have found offensive and might have reacted to, but we readers hear none of them out loud. This was a missed opportunity.

Grade :   B