John Hawkes is an Enemy of Prose

Second Skin
by John Hawkes
p. 1964

Second Skin is an experimental fiction novel by John Hawkes. On John Hawkes’ Wikipedia page, there is a quote of his that reads as follows:

"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

And if I had known about this ahead of time, I might have been forewarned that I would hate John Hawkes.

But alas, I tend to avoid looking up plot or author style to keep my reading as pure as possible the first time around. Unless I am delving into a popular book I’ve heard a lot about, or a serial book by an author I enjoy, I am usually going in blind. Only after I’ve reached the end and have allowed myself some time to consider what I’ve read and form my own impressions do I then research the author and specific novel (if indeed there is any context to research).

With Second Skin, I truly had to resist the urge to look up the book before I was even halfway through, if only for some clue about what was going on. I can honestly say that 200-odd pages later, I still have no idea what was happening in that novel. I know it’s about a middle-aged man named Edward and his tragic, tragic life wherein all his loved ones commit suicide (father, wife, daughter) or are murdered (son-in-law). I got the impression that there was some strange incestuous aspect of his relationship with his daughter Cassandra but this is never confirmed. The whole novel is just weird. Things happen for seemingly no rhyme or reason and they happen in non-linear fashion, of course. It is just chapter after chapter of tragic bemoaning without any cause or consequence or seemingly any wisdom to be gained. Every other word out of the narrator’s mouth is ‘poor’ this person and ‘poor’ that person and oh isn’t it just so sad? And Edward has got to be the most passive narrator ever because he just lets it all happen.

At some point in the novel, I half expected the author to reveal that Edward the Sad Sack King had a dark alternate ego (a ‘second skin,’ if you will) that was responsible for the highly improbable number of deaths in his life, that he in fact murdered his wife and son-in-law and daughter/lover then blocked it out of his conscious mind.

And you know what? That kind of reveal would have absolutely saved this novel.

Perhaps I just don’t ‘get it.’ Perhaps the deeper meaning was more articulate than I’m giving Hawkes credit for and it all just went over my head. I am certainly not the target reader of this novel; I’ve had a long-standing detestation of poetry. My brain has always angled towards the direct over the abstract and I prefer my novels to present themselves as prose. That this novel read more like an epic poem is probably what turned me off it.

Here is another quote of Hawkes’s that I discovered in my attempt to dissect this impossible book:

"Like the poem, the experimental fiction is an exclamation of psychic materials which come to the writer all readily distorted, prefigured in that inner schism between the rational and the absurd."

In other words: this book is intentionally irrational and there’s probably no point in trying to figure out what it all means anyway. What I’ve gleaned from this experience is that I should probably be a little more choosy with what I waste several hours of my life on next time.