Jo Hamya: On Unraveling the Concept of the Novel, the Importance of Talking IRL about Competing Viewpoints, New Modes of Reader Response, and Her New Novel ‘The Hypocrite’
A young Sophia accompanies her father to Sicily, where she helps him write his new book. Years later, Sophia turns this holiday into the subject of her newest play—an incisive portrayal of men of a certain generation. In the audience is her father, unaware that his personal life is about to be turned over for public consumption, and public judgment. Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite (Pantheon Books, 2024) unfolds over one staging of the play, moving between perspectives to paint a witty, nuanced portrait of a gender and generational divide.
I read The Hypocrite in one sitting, almost mirroring the length of time in which it takes place. Following her debut novel Three Rooms, The Hypocrite is proof of Hamya’s incredible ability to use language to illuminate the way we live today. I spoke to Hamya on a video call about her craft, unraveling the concept of the novel, and her hopes that her book will start conversations.
Nirica Srinivasan: The book switches between perspectives, Sophia and her father’s, but neither character feels entirely unsympathetic or entirely sympathetic. What was it like to find that balance?
Jo Hamya: It happened quite naturally because it was a foundational aspect of the plot. I wasn’t so much concerned about whether I would be able to balance my sympathies towards them—I was more concerned with what information I was giving out about each character, because I knew that would change the dynamic they had with the reader.
To me, they were, from very early on, both very sympathetic characters in their own ways. I think there’s a really interesting mode of reader response in our current moment where there’s a desire to relate to a character, or to like a character, in order to take them seriously or engage with a story. It was very important to me to make sure that what they were doing to each other was humanely terrible. No one was ever gonna die in this book. No one was ever going to harm each other physically. There’s a Rachel Cusk epigraph at the start where she talks about psychological violence being a really distinct and material fact of the twenty-first century. I try to approach it like when you’re having Sunday lunch with your family, and one of your grandparents or your aunts or your parents will say something really, really terrible—your job is to synthesize that and then love them afterwards anyway. That’s how I saw the task of writing those two characters.
NS: Both this and Three Rooms engage closely with the way we live today, and also a very contemporary discourse. Some writers aim for timelessness, and there are some books that are very definitively rooted in time. How do you think about where your novels are situated in time?
JH: I don’t think it’s ever occurred to me to write a timeless novel—I’m writing the next book now, and it occurred to me that maybe it should be a kind of placeless or amorphous novel, but it has a very distinct timeline from around 2022 to 2023. Maybe writers who write timeless novels are aiming for something different, a sort of aesthetic appreciation or moral appreciation that transcends their contemporary concerns. But those standards of value can only really be born out of their present moment. Even if they’re interpreting a medieval text or an eighteenth century text, and they’re saying, I like that better than my present moment, it’s still a reactionary thought to the twenty-first century. So I always think of timelessness in a novel as being impossible.
More personally, I wrote my first book when I was twenty-one, and I’m twenty-seven now. I hope they’re good and I hope they’re readable, but I don’t really think of these as the great books that I will write in my life, if I do end up writing great books. I think of them as a sort of formative exercise, and they’re professionally formative because I’m teaching myself how to write. They’re also personally formative in the way that your twenties are, because I’m thinking through my personal values in relation to the time that I’m in. With my first novel, I was thinking through a crisis of housing and class and earning potential—all things that you think about when you come out of university. A couple of years ago I’d moved on to questions of identity, how to relate to other generations, and what sort of woman I’d like to be in the world and what sort of men I might encounter. So I think they’re quite rooted in time, maybe because they’re rooted in the fact that I’m in my twenties and I’m experiencing time in a very formative and intense way at the moment.
NS: That’s such an interesting way to think about it. I was curious because with contemporary discourse, certain kinds of thinking move quite quickly, which means that sometimes you can tell that a book was written in a time we’re past now.
JH: Which is interesting! Some people will levy that at a novel as a criticism, but they’ll read World War II poetry, and that is a very clear product of thinking over a very specific, set number of years, a uniquely historical point in time. I always think, why can’t you extend that grace for literature that’s being produced in your own lifetime? Thinking does move very quickly now, sort of in the manner of a social media timeline refreshing itself over and over again. But then isn’t it really interesting that you have this material object that has suspended at least one of those modes of thought forever, or at least for however long it’s in print? You get to revisit a beginning or a middle of that gestation of thought, and you get to think over it properly with some sort of longevity, as opposed to via a Twitter timeline or a TikTok.
NS: The beginning of The Hypocrite feels almost languid—Sophia’s father is watching the play unfold, and Sophia is having lunch—but there’s a certain point where the pace picks up and you switch between perspectives really quickly. It felt almost cinematic. What was it like to pace the events of the book?
JH: The pacing was bound up with anticipated reader response. At the beginning, these characters are strangers, and you need to get to know them. The book starts off around half one in the afternoon, and to me that’s a really languid time of day. After a certain point, you’ve gotten to know these characters—you’ve gotten to know the nature of their love and hostility towards one another, you know where a lot of their worldviews come from, and the exact nature of their conflicts. Then it seemed only right to speed up the tempo of their thoughts.
At a certain point, I wanted their thoughts or memories to blur into one another, because they’re talking about the same thing—they’re recounting the same period of their lives to each other. I wanted it to seem like one long narrative polyphonic stretch where you could almost lose track of who was talking. You were just being thrown these contradictory facts. I was really hoping the concept of the reader holding a novel would unravel and they would notice that they were holding a constructed object. Years ago, Zadie Smith wrote an essay about reader awareness where she said that it’s good for readers to remember that they are holding a book, and not dive headfirst in a very emotive way into what they’re reading—to step back and think. I hope those languid stretches at the beginning lull you in, and then at a certain point, that breaks and you remember that you are being manipulated into taking certain sides or thinking certain things.
NS: I think it’s amazing when a book makes you aware that it’s constructed. Another way that happened for me in The Hypocrite was that I was constantly surprised by playful phrases—like “tired employees’ wilting mouths” or the sentence “Hiccups are pulling her mother’s sentences ever so slightly out of tune.” How do you approach language and craft on a sentence level?
JH: I love thinking about language! I think I approach it in two ways. One is very academic. I have a very weird interest in semiotics and in axiological literary theory. I primarily think of language as something constructed for effect, rather than necessarily solely for communication or to move a reader. Sometimes that happens on a really basic level—I remember being about fourteen or fifteen, and that’s a brilliant point to read in your life because you don’t necessarily have the intellect to understand exactly what you are reading, but the sound of it impacts you very, very powerfully. I think when I’m reading, I’m breaking down sentences in a close reading sense. I don’t necessarily do that to my own sentences, but I become very aware of what I personally value in a well-constructed sentence, and what I think leads to a bad sentence.
Then there’s a more emotional, maybe even aestheticized way of thinking about it. I think of writing as being the closest I could get to playing a musical instrument. I used to play violin for about eight years, but I was really bad at it. I quit because I realized that I’d spent almost a decade of my life trying to pull beautiful sounds out of this instrument, and the best I could do was something that was proficient, but not beautiful. I moved away from that and I took an interest in reading instead, but I think I have the same impulse with writing. I don’t for that reason have a lot of patience for exposition, both when I’m reading and when I’m writing. I don’t find it a very useful thing to do in a novel because it sounds really flat and affectless, and you can tell people the exact same thing in a different, better-sounding way. I think ideas of language and craft come out of reading a lot—reading outside of your perceived interests, and reading really good critical theory, which is probably what sharpens your instinct to write good sentences. And reading poetry and listening to music is probably what incentivizes you to write beautiful sentences. I know some people who might look down on me for saying that I make an effort to write beautiful sentences, but that doesn’t mean they have to be meaningless sentences.
I still feel like I’m teaching myself what exactly I think a good novel is by writing them. I do hope to get to a point where that’s a slightly more fluid part of whatever I’m writing, when it just comes out and I don’t really need to think about it while I’m writing. I think about it while I’m writing now, but maybe in ten years it’ll just be a reflex.
NS: Did you enjoy writing a book set in and around a play production? Were there other stories in similar settings you looked toward?
JH: I wanted to create a context where the reader would be self-conscious of themselves as a reader, so I had a lot of fun occasionally finding ways to break the fourth wall between the text and the reader, and introducing a sense of artificiality through the running of the theater. On stage everything is beautiful, magical, but then behind you’ve got wires all over the floor and you’ve got an assistant trying to get an actor to the curtain, or a corporate office somewhere in the building where some very stressed-out interns are trying to fundraise. That was tons of fun because it’s not something that you are generally told to do, as a writer, to gesture at the artificiality of the book that you are writing.
I can’t think of many books that I was aware of while writing that do a similar thing, although I did reread Between the Acts by Woolf. I thought a lot about behind-the-scenes commentary and about plays that I’d really enjoyed. I’m a big fan of the National Theater’s recent revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter. They’ve made this beautiful mini-film, which delves into how each aspect of the play was updated—what does loneliness mean from a twentieth century to a twenty-first century context? What does celebrity culture mean from a twentieth century to a twenty-first century context? It’s particularly amazing because the play itself is such a seamless, beautifully designed onslaught, and you’re too busy laughing to really think about all the work that’s gone into it.
There’s a Mark Doty poem about a point in his life where he was living in New York and he was watching The Hours be filmed, an adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway. He was watching Meryl Streep come out of a flower shop with a camera on her and thinking about the idea of Mrs. Dalloway buying flowers again and again, reinterpreted into a new medium. I was thinking a lot about those sorts of meta-narratives.
NS: This might be getting into spoiler territory, but did you always plan to end with a chapter that switches perspective to someone we’ve not heard from before—Elena, the housekeeper?
JH: I don’t believe in spoilers, for the record—I think if a piece of literary fiction can’t survive spoilers then it hasn’t done a very good job!
It wasn’t always my idea—it was a scene that came towards the end of the book, but not at the very end. It was my agent’s idea to move it to the end. The moment she said it, it felt incredibly right. I have a preoccupation with people who perform care for a wage, and for people who are either indifferent or sort of charmingly indifferent to that fact. I think their job and how characters respond to their job is a very good moral epicenter for a book to revolve around, even if they only appear glancingly. Since I’d intended to write a book that was so concerned with ideas of judgment, it felt right because she was the perfect kind of character, and her job was the perfect job, to explore for that kind of judgment to take place.
The other really lovely thing is, and I don’t mean this in a pejorative way, but you’ve had these incredibly bourgeois characters having a family argument for two hundred and something pages. It’s amazing to me that it feels like the world to them, and because they are lucky enough to be able to make art out of it, it takes up other people’s attention spans as well. But it’s really nothing… I mean, it’s not nothing, but the only people to whom this is truly important is them. I feel this way about a lot of information that gets funneled through social media. I will watch people having these incredibly prolonged ideological arguments over a very specific incident that happened in a person’s life, and the only people to whom it matters are not talking to each other about it, they’re arguing online about it. And you step away from it and you forget about it in seconds. Elena was a really great representative function of that mode of thinking—she has spent a whole summer embroiled in these people’s petty disputes, and only because she’s being paid to. The only normal thing to do when they leave is to just be like, well, that was pointless. And forget about it.
NS: Your book was released earlier in the UK, and it’s recently been released in the US. How has the response been? Do you engage with reviews or reader responses at all?
JH: I’ve read a couple of reviews, but I haven’t spent a lot of time engaging with them this time, because I had very clear objectives for this book, which were personal to me—learning how to write a nonlinear timeline, learning how to create reader investment in characters, learning how to put together plot, which is something that I hadn’t necessarily done in my first book. I felt satisfied that I’d achieved those objectives.
I’ve been reading some reader comments because I’m very interested to know what their response has been. A lot of the book is made up of readerly modes of engagement—I purposefully left a lot of emotionally blank space in the book for readers to fill, and now I want to know how they filled it. I’ve really enjoyed how opposing some of those responses have been. I read one guy who seemed to think that I’d written this book as a kind of pat on the back to middle-aged and older-aged men, as a way of showing them sympathy and making sure that they weren’t being left behind. Whilst I’m not really a hundred percent behind the tone of what he wrote, I do find that sort of heartwarming, or just really interesting, because then there’s this whole other cohort—typically women—who read this book and side with Sophia and say, this is a book about the difficulty of being a woman in the world and how that is passed down through generations, and what men do to us. It’s crazy to me, to have those two responses to the same novel! I really, really loved it so much. I get great joy out of that.
I want those people to talk to each other, more importantly. I want them to get in a room with each other, not online, where they can feel emboldened to insult each other or to tell each other that they’re wrong. I want them to sit down in a circle and talk to each other and listen to each other, and to tease out why they responded to the book in certain ways, and maybe further along from that, tease out why they respond to each other in certain ways. Insofar as reader response, it feels very encouraging. With critical response, I have gratitude to the US for taking this experiment seriously, and not hinging it so much on the performance of an author’s identity.
NS: As you were saying that, I was thinking of the moment in The Hypocrite when, after not talking, and then talking through a screen, Sophia and her father finally get into the same room.
JH: I loved writing those scenes—it’s amazing what they can say to each other through a screen that they can’t say to each other when they’re both in a room.
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Jo Hamya is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among other publications.
