John Hawkes occupies a peculiar place in contemporary American fiction. He is one of the few truly gifted writers in the so-called black humor movement which has flourished since 1950, but he lacks the renown enjoyed by less talented authors. In the years since World War II innovative American fiction has turned from the documentation of social forms and the use of realistic technique to an evocation of nightmare and fear. The feeling of disruption left from the war, the specter of atomic catastrophe so viv...

In Pornography and the Law, a book written by two psychologists [Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen], eleven "major criteria" for obscene books are listed. Of the eleven, eight are applicable to the work of Hawkes, especially to his plays and to the novels The Time Twig, Second Skin, and Blood Oranges. Those eight ingredients are: seduction; defloration; incest; the permissive-seduction parent figure; supersexed males; nymphomaniac figures; homosexuality; and flagellation…. But although Ha...

The novelist's first allegiance is to his art, but it's impossible for me to think of fiction without a moral center. Mine is Conradian. My work is an effort to expose the worst in us all, to cause us to face up to the enormities of our terrible potential for betrayal, disgrace, and criminal behavior. I think that it is necessary to destroy repression while showing at the same time that the imagination is unlimited…. The work that is deeply and truly moral violates conventional morality...

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...

With Virginie: Her Two Lives, Hawkes is once again playing the keeper of the crypt, decorating the sarcophagi with amorous doodles. The novel, narrated by a tremulous waif named Virginie, shuttles like a time-machine from a castle of regimented decadence in rural France (the year—significantly—is 1740, the year of Sade's birth) to a low-rent house of bawdiness in Paris (1945). Under both roofs Virginie flits about on her errands like a nest-tidying bird, bearing rapt witness to the deba...

There is considerable resistance in the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant tradition to the notion that sexuality might involve more than the sum of the relevant parts. Since John Hawkes' novel, Virginie: Her Two Lives, is set squarely in the context of a quite other, Mediterranean tradition of metaphysical eroticism in which sex is seen as a profound metaphor for the more bewildering aspects of the human condition, it is possible that this glittering, tender, extraordinary parable may be misconstrued in our pr...

[In] conception and execution ["Virginie"] has a certain grandeur and an impressive flaw…. "Virginie" is an ambitious enterprise, an eclectic anthology of erotica, a reckless attempt to embrace irreconcilable forms, from medieval love poetry to modern pornography. The resulting flaw is forgivable. So many "sources and influences" have been assembled here like pearls on a narrative string that even as the author strains to close the clasp, his necklace comes a...

The preoccupation with sexual anxiety and impotence may mislead readers into seeing The Passion Artist as a continuation of Hawkes's trilogy: Blood Oranges, Death, Sleep and the Traveler, Travesty. But the new novel has little of their sinuous, suave, playful sophistication, and very few moments of perverse bliss. It represents, rather, an altogether conscious and very powerful return, after 30 years, to the bleak, devastated fictive world and the psychic cripplings of The Cannibal. [The] pervasive m...

Konrad Vost, hero of "The Passion Artist," continues Hawkes's fictional interest in relations between the sexes. Vost's artistry in passion is his ability to walk a thin line between desire and frustration. His erotic passivity and anger are counterweights, each checking the pull of the other from giving in or letting go. (p. 7) Hawkes seems fascinated by ambivalence as a deadlock between passivity and violence. When Vost permits a young prostitute to beckon him out of his six-ye...

John Hawkes's new novel, Virginie, is a book about eroticism that seems more concerned with doubling than coupling. Taking pains to mirror earlier models—from the troubadours to Georges Bataille—it also offers matching narratives: both recounted by Virginie, a girl in her eleventh year and at the eleventh hour of her innocence…. Between the two narratives, parallels proliferate. Lines and images recur. The culmination—havoc wreaked by an avenging mother—is the same ...

[John Hawkes, a] prolific, well-regarded author of modernist fiction, has in "Virginie: Her Two Lives" written what is at once a parody, pastiche and examination of erotic prose, the literature of arousal. It is an indubitably original and inventive undertaking, superbly written by a man totally in control of his effects. In one fundamental way it is different from the genre it is founded upon; examining the difference is, I think, the object of the exercise. At its center is an untouched inno...

The Passion Artist is a startling, erotic, terrifyingly honest and stylistically lush achievement, the kind of novel his readers have come to expect from John Hawkes. Once again, Hawkes focuses upon a "traveler," here a "stationary traveler," one Konrad Vost, the typical Hawkes male: the searching self, questing for meaning as defined by his relationships with the several significant women in his life. (p. 278) Vost's most important journey … focuses upon his attemp...

Hawkes's Virginie is a series of interwoven erotic tableaux, very deliberate, intensely artificial, conceived as he says in a reverie on de Sade…. In each, an 11-year-old Virginie, little sister of the master of ceremonies, plays the part of accomplice, voyeuse and narrator. And though one narrative is heraldic and archaic, while the other is slatternly and burlesque, Virginie's constant presence draws them into a single focus. The point being, for Hawkes, that speculations on the art o...