Three Rooms by Jo Hamya review – on belonging and inequality
There are writers that Jo Hamya admires: Virginia Woolf, for one. Lines from A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s 1928 Cambridge lecture about women writers and independence, provide the epigraph to Hamya’s ultra-contemporary debut novel, Three Rooms. It’s Oxford University, though, where Three Rooms begins, with a young unnamed woman of colour struggling to find her place as she starts a job as a research assistant. Hamya admires Rosemary Tonks, too – the now largely forgotten mid 20th-century poet. She quotes Tonks when her forlorn narrator leaves Oxford for a poorly paid job as a copy editor at a London society magazine: “On my bad days (and I’m being broken / At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions …” It’s the same melancholy that underpins this bleak novel about broken young womanhood and the stalled ambitions of millennials following the financial crisis of 2008 and the EU referendum.
But then there are other writers whom Hamya’s narrator views with a delicious contempt. She reads them compulsively while looking for work in London and sleeping on a stranger’s sofa for £80 a week. These are books by unnamed contemporary authors, comprising long-form essays “on breaking up with your iPhone, the tyranny of yoga, the tyranny of Amazon [and] the conversation they had with their non-binary non-white friend that changed their perspective on – not to sound dramatic – everything”.
Hamya’s observations are biting and truthful. She points to the discomforting chasm between popular lifestyle writing and the basic struggle to live – the ubiquitous inanity of one and the sheer desperation of the other. This is a novel about precarious housing, precarious work and precarious mental health: all things that are connected. When the narrator arrives in Oxford, it’s September 2018, and she is following the news of Britain’s efforts to exit the EU. Her room there is not a home but a temporary “repository” for university researchers, and not even the heritage plaque to 19th-century art critic Walter Pater can distract her from the fact that Oxford is also the place responsible for “spawning the government that daily diminished her ability to afford a mortgage or the cost of rent”.
The hypocrisy of being there leaves her adrift, unable to connect with her surroundings. When a friendly neighbour reveals that he voted to leave the EU, she turns on him furiously: “I don’t think you can be friends with people who you voted to be out of the country they’ve made their home in, mate.” Later, she spills a mug of tea and frantically mops the stained carpet, panicking about her deposit, while he looks on unconcerned. Hamya is most successful when she stages her heroine’s alienation in these set pieces. At other times, her prose veers into the style of a newspaper opinion piece (“Perhaps what the rampant racism, anti-immigration policy and classism came down to was an arbitrarily powerful group of people ...”). It’s not that this is unpersuasive, rather that it breaks the book’s spell.
At the centre of this novel are fraught ideas of belonging and inequality. In Three Rooms Hamya gives us a heroine who is able neither to afford a home nor to feel at home – not in her temporary accommodations, her workplace, her society or even her nation. The lavish interiors pictured in the glossy magazine that she works for cannot be reconciled with the gutted silhouette of Grenfell Tower on the skyline. The crisis of housing is tangled up with the larger crisis of nationhood.
This makes Three Rooms a polemical novel, in a tradition of women writing about the cost of freedom that includes Woolf and leads to novelists such as Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk. But the book also belongs to a new genre of socially realist writing about millennial poverty and what that does to women’s ambitions (see Raven Leilani’s Luster, Lily King’s Writers and Lovers and, most recently, Anna Glendenning’s An Experiment in Leisure). Hamya’s writing isn’t always skilled, but she is astute at portraying a new young precariat, rich in culture and education, but poor in housing and job opportunities. When asked why she doesn’t return home to her parents, Hamya’s narrator breaks down into a sobbing monologue. “Why should I, when did it become ridiculous to think that a stable economy and fair housing market are unreasonable expectations?”
Hamya’s narrator feels this injustice keenly, but the difficulty is that she doesn’t seem to feel very much else. Others passingly remark of her “You look a bit sad” and “You look a bit clueless”, but if Hamya is intending to signal alienation, it also means that her heroine isn’t great company for the reader. The surrounding characters – the Oxford neighbour, a semi-famous Instagram star, the wealthy staff at the magazine – are all thinly sketched ciphers of entitlement. Still, this is a novel in which disaffection feels real – and, at the novel’s end, the wraith-like heroine finds a heartstoppingly dramatic expression of her distress.
• Three Rooms is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
