While most novelists are still slouching down the over marked trails of human experience (including the trail of erotic experience) like bored guides hustling us on to the next souvenir stand, John Hawkes has a seemingly endless capacity to make fresh wilderness out of every new work he writes. The trouble, for his readers, is that wilderness is not like home: there will be natives who don't speak our language; beasts, perhaps, with a taste for human flesh. Almost certainly, we will get lost. And how can we trust a guide who doesn't know how to act like a buddy? Or a lover?…
Most of us can at least nod knowingly when we hear his titles dropped (The Blood Oranges, The Cannibal, The Lime Twig, The Passion Artist). But few have actually read his work. Hawkes's unpopularity has been ascribed to the difficulty of his vision ("modernist"), to his discomfiting refusal of received ideas ("eccentricity") and to his making "terror rather than love the center of his works." This last assessment, by Leslie Fiedler, comes closest to describing why the fainthearted avoid Hawkes and why his intrepid followers celebrate him. I would, though, quarrel with half of Fiedler's evaluation—which implies that Hawkes deliberates over love as subject before he rejects it. Like the Grand Canyon, Hawkes's fiction tells us, love's landscape has been littered by too many tourists. We can be shocked into pleasure now only by nightmare.
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