Pity the Bad Man

The story goes that John Milton—who went blind in his early 40s—composed 20 lines of Paradise Lost in his mind each evening, and then repeated them aloud the next day to an assortment of amanuenses, among them his three daughters. Their work has been especially romanticized. In portraits that hang in great museums, Milton gazes skyward, as if receiving his dictation from heaven, and the young women—Anne, Mary, and Deborah—lean toward him, eagerly awaiting his next divine word.

What the paintings don’t show is that these three women are generally believed to have loathed their father, who forced them to read aloud in languages they did not speak and to spend countless hours attending to his genius. When a family servant relayed the news of Milton’s marriage to their second and final stepmother (he hadn’t told them himself), Mary is said to have drolly noted that if she “could hear of his death that was something.” One way to portray Milton is as a writer who entrusted his daughters with 11,000 intricate lines of his epic poem about Adam and Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden and the triumph of wily Satan. But if the lore about his disaffected daughters is true, they would perhaps have seen it differently: In accordance with his depiction of Eve as Adam’s simple helpmeet, their father assumed that they would be delighted to serve his mind, and he took little interest in their own endeavors. Then again, we don’t know their precise feelings—they didn’t have the opportunity to write them down.

In The Hypocrite, the young British writer Jo Hamya’s second novel, a 21st-century daughter is asked to play amanuensis for her father in much the same way. Sophia, 17 and freshly released from the bonds of secondary school, spends a month in Sicily with her well-known novelist father. There, the two of them sit at the kitchen table for hours each day as he dictates to her. “Your job is to take it all down so that I can talk freely … New paragraph open quote start italics.” He is demanding and unfatherly, a boss instructing a peon. Ironically, his novel is about “teenagers fancying each other on holiday,” something that Sophia—simultaneously eager to please her dear old dad and to assert her independence—hints she might know a bit more about than he does. But her father skips over the salacious parts with her. “Some of it is too grown up for you, cherub.”

Unlike Milton’s daughters, Sophia ultimately gets her say, publicly. A decade after the Italian trip, Sophia is a few weeks into staging a critically lauded play in London’s West End. The novel is set over the course of the afternoon, early in the play’s run, when her father first watches it, with flashbacks to that summer in Sicily. Sophia hasn’t shared the script with him and he has avoided reviews, so he is unaware that the play is about him, that it will open with a 10-minute sex scene featuring a look-alike of a woman he actually bedded—and that he’ll soon consider his cherub a fallen angel. By the novel’s end, he’ll have sweated through his shirt, locked himself in a café bathroom, broken down in sobs and humiliated himself in front of a few hundred people, and relived his life as a parent, an artist, and a cultural figure through the gimlet eye of his only child.

[Read: David Foster Wallace and the dangerous romance of male genius]

Should we—would you—pity this man?

What if I told you that he’d recently been depressed, isolated during the early days of England’s COVID-19 lockdown? That he’d stopped doing dishes and laundry, that he would stare into space and mutter to himself? That a man whom The Telegraph had once ranked “one of a hundred most important people in twentieth-century British culture” hadn’t produced a new novel in 10 years? That his ex-wife had moved back into his home just to buttress his disintegrating emotional state?

Sophia’s father—a man without a name, a person known only in relation to his child—is an object to be held up to the light and wondered at. Is this, this, the stuff that men are made of? Are these the fearsome creatures who have ruled the planet for all of written history?

But wait. Parental coldness is not his only blunder. “He’s aware,” Hamya writes, “of having been a divisive figure in the past; had leant into it when it meant good money.” He’s a man who defended a Louis C.K.–like figure and “kept referring to the fact that the comedian had asked each of these women whether masturbating in front of them was okay.” He’s publicly said that he loves multiracialism because he has “Polish and Hungarian ex-girlfriends,” and that “white men are experiencing racism within the publishing industry.” According to a critic, he offends people for a living. According to his family, he’s an entitled exploiter: He took on none of the rearing of his daughter and then set her to work on his manuscript like an unpaid intern. As Sophia’s mother puts it to her, “I kept you with me for almost eighteen years without him interfering and he still managed to ruin it at the very end.” The grown-up Sophia is most distressed by his fiction: “When I read his books, they’re like prolonged rape scenes in films.”

Now how do you feel about him?

I’ve asked you to assess Sophia’s father before considering Sophia—the crumbling man before the rising woman—because Hamya does so too, though slyly. Depending on how you read it, this is Sophia’s novel: She gets a name; she gets a play; she gets the agency to move figures around on a stage and have them act out her whims. But right away, he gets the power of a point of view, which is unusual for a man in a novel like this one. I’ve given him narrative supremacy here because that’s precisely what The Hypocrite pushes us to contemplate—whether we can understand women’s stories about powerlessness and oppression without men’s voices.

The Hypocrite falls into the category of #MeToo novels, a label that presumes a perspective that Hamya plays with adroitly. Novels focusing on the imbalance of power between men and women didn’t arrive with the hashtag, and they’ll outlive it too. But a cavalcade of new fiction in recent years has addressed the issue of what happens when an oppressed, assaulted, and fearful gender tries to claim new authority. Idra Novey’s Those Who Knew (2018) played out a revenge fantasy, and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (2018) took up the question of whether retribution or forgiveness is the more appropriate response to sexual violence. Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018) and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (2018) asked whether a woman can assent to her subjugation. In Trust Exercise (2019), Susan Choi constructed a sexual-assault story in which each new layer of information upends what came before. When truth is so debated, she asked, can coherent narratives really convey anything useful? Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022), perhaps the most incendiary of the bunch, presents a wife who tacitly approves of her husband’s dalliances—as long as her own kinky appetites aren’t suppressed.

[Read: How to tell an open secret]

The Hypocrite trades off between two primary narratives: One keeps close third-person company with Sophia’s father as he sits through the play, the other with Sophia as she lunches with her mother at the same time. He is confused at first about why the set is a perfect replica of the kitchen in their Sicilian lodgings, and then, as the opening scene of loud, thrusty screwing begins, wonders “what Sophia means by setting up a sex scene in the only place she’s ever, as far as he knows, engaged with his writing.”

His recognition is slow and painful: The man onstage is him—the character even talks to each of his lovers about the themes and plot points of Sophia’s father’s last novel. And then he registers the kick in the ass to his ego: “He had assumed Sophia did not tell him about this play for a long time out of embarrassment; to eliminate the possibility that he might tell her it was bad … Now the realisation—perhaps her omission was to spare his feelings, not hers.” The play is, unfortunately for him, very, very good. Better, he thinks, than anything he’s ever done.

In the theater’s rooftop restaurant, Sophia does not have the posture of a victor: “The thought of him now as unhappy and bowed settles in her stomach like flu.” She and her mother argue about the fairness of making her father represent all men, and whether Sophia’s work has evened the playing field between them or exacerbated the tension. Although her father has let her mother down more than he has any other woman, the conversation between mother and daughter is strangled.

They talk at cross-purposes about whether his sexual presumption makes him a low-grade villain. “But really, tell me this,” her mother asks. “Outside of the make-believe he makes his money on, have you ever come across a direct quote that says he hates women?” Sophia, like her father later, cries in the bathroom. She’s wrested control of his novel, but along the way, she’s sacrificed him on the altar of her art, which has only continued their ouroboros of humiliation and creative abuse. Both are furious at how they’ve been co-opted, and are determined to prove that they’re the enlightened party. Hamya, unlike most of her #MeToo counterparts, doesn’t take sides. Moral clarity isn’t on offer.

[Read: The movement of #MeToo]

The Hypocrite is a brilliant litmus test of a novel, which doesn’t mean it’s indecisive or wavering. Hamya, an elder member of Gen Z, proposes that multiple theories can all be true at once—that Boomers can feel indignant about changing social mores while their children encourage necessary change, that men and women can intellectually attack each other with equally wounding vigor, that the question of how to handle womanizers (to purposely use a dated term) is not easily answered by shaming them. How you interpret The Hypocrite says more about you than it does about the novel: Hamya knows that your pity is just as valuable—and misleading—as her characters’.

The problem with pity is that it’s so often interpreted as a soft emotion, a synonym for empathy or compassion. Asking women to pity men is like asking the subjugated worker to pity his greedy boss. But pity, crucially, is also a weapon: It makes its object smaller and weaker, while casting the pitier as solicitous and tender. In Mary Wollstonecraft’s founding text of feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pity is a yoke she wants to throw off. “Those beings who are only the objects of pity,” she writes, “will soon become objects of contempt.” After almost two and a half centuries, turning the tables and whittling a man down to a pitiful creature is still a revolutionary act. It remakes him in the stereotyped image of the woman—subject to the whims of his emotions, cowed by larger forces. So the question Should we pity men? does not elevate them to any shining status of victimhood.

By the play’s intermission, after Sophia’s father has come to the discomfiting conclusion that it’s “like the novel Sophia helped him write, but better,” he encounters another audience member outside having a smoke. The young woman, referred to as Round Glasses, opens the conversation: “I think I know who you are … Can’t say I’m a fan.” And this is when his collapse begins in earnest and Hamya’s talent for meaningful laceration crescendos.

Round Glasses eviscerates Sophia’s father, reading off a list of people and groups he’s offended: “Jews. Muslims. Catholics. Christians. Americans. Anyone who died or lost a loved one in 9/11. Gays. Women. Trans women.” She savages the play too: “Your daughter’s done nothing brave. Her whole conceit makes me cringe. It’s actually very common, very BBC. All these white female characters making a show of reclaiming an anglophone novel from a privileged white man. Like that’s changing the narrative.” Sophia’s father skewers Round Glasses, a white woman “wearing Carhartt overalls and pristine Birkenstocks,” poking at the way she “feast[s] on the degradation of others,” and how all of her opinions are “rephrased junk from strangers who pour their heart out via globalised American media conglomerates on the internet.” These two strangers lob invectives at each other, but victory isn’t intellectual. It comes only when he snipes that she has “no compassion,” at which Round Glasses smiles. “I hadn’t thought of you as someone whose feelings were so easily hurt.” The conversation ends. Checkmate, pity takes king.

From there, the story converges on a meeting between father and daughter, a moment to confront each other about their generational and gender gaps. Verdicts collide. Sophia’s play is hilarious and transcendent; a woman seated near her father has tears on her cheeks from laughter. At the same time, the play turns Sophia into an object of contempt to her mother. Everyone in these pages is thrown off-balance, all of them just scarred little people, fumbling in the dark.

What Hamya brings to this modern debacle, besides a precision of language and an aptitude for structure that ought to make her contemporaries quake, is a tenderness you don’t see coming. That’s partly why The Hypocrite doesn’t rest easily among #MeToo novels, despite its subject matter. Pity is a natural feeling between generations, each of which thinks the other is surely misunderstanding something important about life—and yet, bonds are strong: Ceasing to recognize your parent’s or child’s humanity is nearly impossible.

Hamya successfully makes a muddle with The Hypocrite, and I mean that as high praise. Contemporary fiction too often seeks the relief of some imagined perfect morality, perhaps because so many readers now conflate the beliefs of characters and their creator. It’s a pleasure to read a 27-year-old writer who embraces the novel’s power to fog up certainties about “bad men”—and prods readers to join in.

This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “Pity the Bad Man.”