Books: In the Dream

Death, Sleep & the Traveler By John Hawkes

New Directions, 179 pp., $6.95 John Hawkes writes with dizzying brilliance. His novels yield to the reader like geishas, and ask only that the reader yield in return. Experimental, dreamlike, sensuous, comic, and solid, his novels burn like clean aromatic wood, like a forest of sandalwood on the hearth of the intellect.