Volume 17, Number 6 · October 21, 1971
What Went Wrong?
By Roger Sale
The Blood Oranges
by John Hawkes
New Directions, 288 pp., $6.95
The Tenants
by Bernard Malamud
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 230 pp., $6.95
St. Urbain's Horseman
by Mordecai Richler
Knopf, 467 pp., $7.95
Wonderland
by Joyce Carol Oates
Vanguard, 493 pp., $7.95
John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges fails because it is the work of a contemptible imagination. Hawkes has always seemed to me more an unadmitted voyeur of horror than its calm delineator, but in this new novel the pretense that what is being described is horrifying is dropped, and we have only the nightmare vision of a narrator unable to see how awful he is. He is a 'sex-singer,' a middle-aged expert in love who is frequently delighted to tell us in what good shape he is, how he looks in his trunks, how skilled he is in bed. He and his wife want and capture other people, in this case another couple, and they insist the world should learn to have its sex with the same impersonal, erotic ennui that is their staple emotion. Their insistence that they are flexible and free is belied by the rigid emptiness of their daily round: sit on the beach, climb a hill to see a peasant or a goat, screw expertly.
Review, 4492 words
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