The Hypocrite - Hardcover

Hamya, Jo

 
9780593701034: The Hypocrite
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593701038 ISBN 13: 9780593701034
Verlag: Pantheon Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • DAKOTA JOHNSON’S TEATIME PICTURES SEPTEMBER BOOK CLUB PICK ? From a fiercely talented writer poised to be a new generation’s Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, a novel set between the London stage and Sicily, about a daughter who turns her novelist father’s fall from grace into a play, and a father who increasingly fears his precocious daughter’s voice.

“A sharp book, beautifully written.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind and Entitlement

"Excellent...I enjoyed the novel hugely...Like Edward St Aubyn and Anne Enright, Hamya is so good on generational conflict, the friction of family, and the damage done by charming but complacent men. But The Hypocrite is a strikingly original book too. I tore through it, shoulders clenched but full of admiration."
—David Nicholls, author of One Day, in Electric Literature

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 have hoped, 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. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them. When the house lights dim however, he understands that his daughter has laid him bare, has used the events of their summer to create an incisive, witty, skewering critique of the attitudes and sexual mores of the men of his generation.  

Set through one staging of the play, The Hypocrite seamlessly and scorchingly shifts time and perspective, illuminating an argument between a father and his daughter that, with impeccable nuance, examines the fraught inheritances each generation is left to contend with and the struggle to nurture empathy in a world changing at lightning-speed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JO HAMYA is the author of Three Rooms and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times, among others. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at King’s College London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In his North London kitchen, Sophia’s father measures out two teaspoons of sugar and stirs them into his cup. There is a leftover plate in front of him smeared with apple preserves and dough. He takes it to the sink. On the counter, the Evening Standard urges him to take advantage of the country’s new-found freedom by tucking into oysters at VinegarYard, by seeing Titian conquer love and death at the National Gallery; it asks him to eat out to help out, a phrase even he has grown bored of turning into a joke by way of past lovers’ genitalia. The paper extols the benefits of a UK-based ‘staycation’ – a word he has crossed out by hand in vermilion pen.

One evening in April, after a month of making small-talk in his local corner shop with whoever could bear to stand near him for an hour, he sat in front of a pixelated image of the foreign secretary, whose hands conducted such nightly proceedings in absence of the prime minister – he had fallen ill. A gold wedding band had flashed forward with statesmanlike authority while Sophia’s father heard change to our social-distancing measures now would risk a significant increase in the spread; while he heard damage to the economy over a longer period; while he heard measures must remain in place for at least the next three weeks. The hazmat-inspired podium on-screen played on with other speakers for the duration of an hour. He’d called Sophia first. When she didn’t pick up, he called her mother instead and howled. It’s not something his daughter knows about. She’d sent him a text the following morning with a smiley face, having only just recharged her phone. His ex-wife was already in the guest bedroom, unpacking a suitcase into its wardrobe when he cried in slower, longer breaths the second time, and lingered over the typed-out emoticon. With great patience, she taught him how to install a popular new form of video-call software as a way to breach this new form of distance.

Not seeing Sophia, in itself, was not an uncommon event. When his ex-wife left him, there were no arguments about who their daughter would go with. She had been small enough to need constant care he felt it was more natural for her mother to give, and which he couldn’t, because of his work. Gaps in contact became part of their relationship. He took care to mend them – with humour, with presents, and affection. He always wanted to know what she was turning into while she was gone.

During the months in which it had been unclear whether it was safe to see Sophia in person or not, his ex-wife had tactfully left the house once a week under the guise of shopping for food while his daughter moved haltingly across his screen, voice cutting and returning out of sync, face bleached by light coming in from a window in her background. When the calls finished, his ex-wife would reappear with stems of tulips he’d never have thought to buy for himself when alone. He’d watched her move about the house in clothes she’d worn when they were married.

She left him again yesterday. Today, he sets his coffee down on the fat lip of the bathroom’s sink and rakes a comb through his hair. He clips his nails and rubs cream into his hands, takes a clothes brush over the light wool of his grey suit. Twenty minutes later, a cab dispenses him in
front of a theatre in Covent Garden.

Quarter to two in the afternoon. The first thing he does is text Sophia to say he has made it. He sends a smiley face as an afterthought. Then, he lights a cigarette by the building’s edge and searches the crossing to his right.Traffic. Horns coming up from the Strand. People’s sandals, jackets, bags, scurrying past. There’s a woman with her head bent and her thumb on her phone – such an ugly position, he finds. But she has a beautiful olive face and he likes the red colour of her shoes, so he counts her in the composition. She has stopped on the pavement. Now, he is outlining her: making more manifest the jewel drop earrings among her hair and the bangles on her wrist. There’s her calf, her thigh. There’s the twist of summer dress on her chest. As though she knows it would please him, she puts her phone in her pocket and tips her head back at the sky. He has the sun on her face. Who else could make her beautiful like this?

He does it for everyone: today is a benevolent day. A waiter in the restaurant to his left drops a tray he is using to lay silverware on the tables outside, and it’s not unpercussive, the noise it makes – he can add it, somehow, to the thrum, to the music he imagines in his head. It might be excessive, but he makes the silk anemones on the restaurant’s win- dows shake in their pots when it happens, little purple-pink shivers in green. The inside of the theatre ahead is visible through glass walls: the people within are like marionettes, waiting to be moved.When the cigarette goes out, he puts on a cotton mask and goes in.

Now, the presence of others. He waits in a queue elongated by the space individuals keep between themselves and others. Collects his ticket, stub of stiff white; is given an orange plastic square in exchange for his suit jacket. It’s a trade down rather than off, but the room is hot. He is approached, gingerly, on whether he would like to buy a programme for £10 and accepts. Then he is served bad-wedding kind of wine at the bar, cold-misted glass smeared by hot fingers and not enough poured in: he regrets asking for it. It costs £10.25. Still, he enjoys himself. It’s the contained way everything exists in a theatre. Everyone around him is doing the same: ticket, bag check, programme, drinks. Everyone is sipping the same sweating, overpriced alcohol and comparing notes on their pamphlets. If he came here tomorrow, he would find everything identical. It’s a relief that things are normal, with only slight alterations. The half-faces, with eyes peering over cloth. The arrows on the floor, directing movement.They go mostly ignored.

The thing about the theatre foyer is that it has been recently renovated. The open-plan glass extension that spills seamlessly into the old front of house is new: there was less space before. The wall that has been taken down used to display posters of past and ongoing performances. There had been a greater sense of being ushered into the depths of the building, of exiting the world for a few hours to see something less real than what was outside. There had been no windows.The embrace of artificial light. How it is now, transparent, and stippled with other buildings’ shadows, with London streaming in full view, is, he supposes, a new sensibility being asked of the arts. But even so, there are good things about the building’s new set-up. At almost two o’clock, in the height of summer, the sun comes in. The foyer, where it meets the theatre’s front of house, turns everything into a glasshouse where he can watch things grow.

Three-quarters of Sophia’s audience is made up of young people in their twenties and early thirties. They cluster in groups, leaving around them empty space.They know each other’s presence is the potential for sickness or death, and so they display an exquisitely exaggerated consideration in keeping to themselves. They take pictures of everything. The gold balustrades on stairways, the carved walls. They take pictures of themselves. Everything about them is as immaculate as a painting: colour, pose, poise. Their fingers and dexterous wrists, managing their camera phones. None of them lean back, or let their mouths unconsciously drop open. They take off their masks and become plastic, perfectly suspended with arched backs and pursed lips. He sees them pretend to do things like drink...

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Verlag
Pantheon Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593701038
ISBN 13 
9780593701034
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
233
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
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