John Hawkes is one of our best novelists, but Travesty is not one of his best novels.

Travesty By John Hawkes New Directions, 128 pp., $5.95

John Hawkes has long been one of our most admirable authors, quietly keeping to his own path, in and out of the tunnels of darkness. Comic, erotic, and often terrifying, his novels wander into dreams from which the reader does not wish to wake, trances of the sort Nabokov calls “aesthetic bliss.” Neither quite real nor expressly fantastic, Hawkes’s situations compel us to recognize that we harbor their equivalents within ourselves. A typical passage from Travesty may help define Hawkes’s world.

CN

About the Author

Charles Nicol

Travesty By John Hawkes New Directions, 128 pp., $5.95

John Hawkes has long been one of our most admirable authors, quietly keeping to his own path, in and out of the tunnels of darkness. Comic, erotic, and often terrifying, his novels wander into dreams from which the reader does not wish to wake, trances of the sort Nabokov calls “aesthetic bliss.” Neither quite real nor expressly fantastic, Hawkes’s situations compel us to recognize that we harbor their equivalents within ourselves. A typical passage from Travesty may help define Hawkes’s world.