The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Safekeep, a debut novel by Yael van der Wouden, won the 2024 Booker Prize, and the award was well deserved. Set in the Netherlands in 1961, it focuses on Isabel, the only one of three siblings caring for the big old house in which she grew up. Brother Hendrick has moved on to a gay relationship and has no interest in the house.  Brother Louis, to whom her parents seem to have left the house, lives elsewhere, often with one or another of his frequently changing girlfriends.

Isabel’s world revolves around the house and its possessions, including her late mother’s silver , china, and other household belongings, over which Isabel hovers, fiercely protective and anxious when her day help or other visitors are present. Isabel is an intense person, easily given to impatience and anger, with an inability to interact positively with others. She does not like people, and other people do not like her. She is also a frightfully lonely person.

Tension mounts when Louis has a temporary business assignment elsewhere and leaves brassy girlfriend, Eva, to spend much of the summer with Isabel. The atmosphere in the house is highly charged with twists in the relationship and stunning revelations about the house itself.

Van der Wouden successfully tackles themes of family, class, sex, war, guilt, antisemitism, loss and loneliness. The weaving of all the story elements is quite seamless, and the exploration of the key characters is profound, making Safekeep a powerful read.

The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya is set in London in 2020. A grouchy, highly successful novelist (in his sixties) attends a play written by his daughter, Sophia, about 20 years old. He would congratulate her on her achievement had she not modeled the lead character after him and built the story line on their troubled father-child relationship. She obviously sees him as embodying the shortcomings of men of his generation. Throughout the novel, the father is never named.

Playwright Sophia’s staging reproduces in minute detail the interior of the rental home in Sicily where she spent the summer with her father soon after her parents were divorced. There he required her to spend her days typing the novel he is working on, not allowing her to speak while he is shaping his ideas.  He escapes the daily tedium by going into town each night and usually bringing home random women with whom he has sex.  Hers is a harsh and lonely childhood experience, broken up only with a fleeting sexual experience with an older Sicilian boy, an event Sophia has no opportunity to discuss with either parent.

The novel shifts time between the father’s interior struggles attending the play, the earlier time when these events actually occurred, and a contemporaneous luncheon al fresco where the mother and daughter argue about the same issues. Perspectives shift between father and daughter, while the unnamed mother also struggles with her complicated feelings about her ex-husband. There is a huge generational divide between Sophia and her father on issues of gender and sexuality. What they do share, but won’t acknowledge, is a stubbornness and rigid inability to empathize with the other’s perspective.

I wasn’t enamored with this book, though it improved as it proceeded. The structure of the writing, moving back and forth between the stage, the past history, seemed to be an end in itself and interfered with getting comfortable with the characters. None is particularly appealing. The Hypocrite is clever perhaps, but not enough to make this a full-throated recommendation.