Depthless Scenes

...At one point, a character says, "I simply don't understand...

...None of Hawkes' scenes are depth-less...

...To what avail...

...Form is not absent, but neither is it a familiar sort...

...But suddenly, toward the end, we discover ourselves back at the mother's demise...

...he is the least likely writer in the language to simply toss off a title...

...Adcppi, the urchin of "The Goose on the Grave," comes upon La Casa della Contessa, which "with orange out-buildings, a recent grave which the Contessa would not admit lay on her estate, and an empty aviary, belonged to the old lady and was her fortune...

...Or is he as subtle as ever, fully aware that the phrase is soon to be mundane...

...is is indisputable...

...Until one becomes attuned to the nuances that provide the necessary easement, his relentless style can be stultifying...

...A soldier on leave visits his wife and children in "A Little Bit of the Old Slap and Tickle...

...In "The Grandmother," a family makes a portentous meal from the gift of a packaged lamb: "She scraped away the ice until they could see the white of fat and the redness of cold meat...

...We may feel that he has put his finger on the button, but Hawkes makes him out to be a fool...

...Thereafter, the focus is on her son and the characters the waif comes into contact with...

...John Hawkes' other books were so christened as to affirm his particular tangency to the ordinary in literature: The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig, Second Skin...

...Located there, they speak in crystalline tones for the benefit of our chimeras...

...And Lunar Landscapes may offer the best chance yet to draw a bead on him...

...When learning to read Hawkes, they are like reprieves...

...Here, as in the other selections, there is no quickening or relaxing of the tempo, no groundwork, no easily discernible climax, no denouement, none of the usual things which point up structure...

...It makes for monotony...

...No one should hope to feel at home the first time through one of his pieces, and second or third readings can prove still more baffling...

...Hawkes addresses himself pointedly to the subconscious by working through scenes he feels will establish the most resonating correlatives...

...One of his greatest assets is his ability to mold these scenes...

...It is to the charge of obfuscation that Hawkes is most vulnerable, and no perfect rebuttal can be delivered...

...The intensity written into these units makes them transcendent, singular in every aspect...

...one sentence will serve for a whole night and get a child...

...The price Hawkes pays for slighting many of the tenets of fiction-writing is that he is extraordinarily hard to follow...

...Here is an example from the end of "The Owl": "And then there was the air damp and cold and the owl exerting himself into flight, beating through the top branches now, shutting his eyes and crashing through the twigs to the dripping hole in the trunk, settling himself and sitting inside for summers and winters, and he stayed thus, peering out of the warmth, the tenure of silent feathers in a cold tree...

...In the present collection, there are a number of scenes which linger fiendishly in the memory...

...This is very little short of the kind of comprehension Hawkes himself might think ideal...

...In an abandoned mine sweeper beached near the cliffs of Dover?amid the terrible cries of terns, with old ammunition boxes to sit on and a chicken wire playpen...

...Hawkes uses his lexicon with the utmost thoughtfulness and precision...

...It is difficult to tell...

...Hawkes, while not gainsaying this, does not pledge himself to it either...

...This is the key to his art, the crux of his genius...

...for example, the action moves at a steady clip-clop pace and with a minimum of comment from separate bedrooms to a party of sorts, to an encounter, to a dressmakers, to flight, to other things, and to a croquet game at the end...

...A Hawkes sentence can do at least that...

...To this end, all his resources are devoted...

...The subject matter is altogether worldly, neither phantasmal nor saccharine, but at the same time like nothing any other writer has ever dreamed up...

...Hawkes' qualms about literary conventions extend to the most basic one of form...

...And where is home...

...Hawkes' art is determined by the steadfast avoidance of anything hackneyed...

...A scene becomes far riper than it has any right to be, the plot less definite, the tonality increasingly complex...

...Attributes like pique, sauciness, cunning, have no place...

...In his case, this means shirking much that is conventional, indeed axiomatic, in literature...

...The scene comes first, and all else—form, plot, ordering, characterization—is modulated in deference to it...

...This is another assist Hawkes is chary of, although he docs not avoid it as much in these pieces as in his novels...

...He stays a while, living with a slugabed servant, her husband, who is a blind potter, and her mother, who "all day, with her lips drawn back, imitated the noise of the wheel, cursing as it ground against the hours...

...Radicalism cannot be had without cost...

...It's shelter, but it's also decrepitude...

...In his writing classes at Brown University, he insists on the primacy of the scene...

...Arranged roughly according to length, they offer convenient steppingstones for the reader not yet familiar with Hawkes...

...Every reader has the right to expect that what he is dealing with will be put forward in an apprehensible gestalt...

...Readers who are sure that they have not "understood" Hawkes find themselves unable to forget such scenes as the return of the central character in The Lime Twig to rooms he had once shared with his mother, or the belly-bumping contest or snowball fight from Second Skin...

...they are are limned in brown, vaguely ominous, implicitly beset...

...Another novella, "The Goose on the Grave," opens with the abduction of a woman by three priests...

...Has Hawkes become dated...

...This collection is composed of "landscapes," not figments...

...One sentence," he writes in "The Nearest Cemetery," "will sell boats, nets, house and land...

...The scenes are not necessarily ordered by time...

...The rendering milks them for every drop of effect...

...It is a collection of short stories and novellas written between 1949-63, some of which have been previously published...

...To put them over, he strenuously invokes the senses: sights, smells, textures...

...In addition, his characters are more alike than they are different...

...One reason to use this book instead of one of his novels as a primer is the greater number of endings...

...At once precise and haunting, his use of language is stunning...

...But while Hawkes loses because of his iconoclasm, it is little when compared to the gains...

...This is not the accusation of a Philistine...

...Instead of shape, there is sequence—the sequence of scenes, each a bit out of joint, each pruned of referents...

...For the old hand, they afford a good opportunity to sharpen opinions about this difficult writer...

...I feel as if there were a hundred persuasions, attachments, curried and combed asses, all tangling themselves about my neck, all people I have never seen before, but there is nothing I can put my finger on...

...It is the source of both his success and his shortcomings...

...Perhaps he intended his title to be nearly topical, feeling it added more (if contrary) charge to his uncommon sensibility...

...In the novella "Charivari...

...Among the literary devices Hawkes feels he can do without is humor, or wit, or anything that might provide relief...

...Now that earth-lings are about to trip through the moon's silt, the title reads like a photograph caption...

...The nature of the form reinforces a uniformity of tone permeating all of Hawkes' writings...

...And the landscapes are "lunar" in the sense that they stand on the very periphery of our cognizance...

...The result is a primal foreboding quality, reflected in his choice for settings of such shunned locales as cemeteries, hospitals, deserts, and war zones...