Volume 2, Number 4 · April 2, 1964
Hit and Miss
By Robert M. Adams
Second Skin
by John Hawkes
New Directions, 192 pp., $1.60 (paper)
A Fine Madness
by Elliott Baker
Putnam, 319 pp., $4.95
Nearly twenty years ago the question-begging adjective 'experimental' was tastened, clamp-like, to the work in fiction of John Hawkes; and the first service one can do for his latest novel, Second Skin, is to get rid of that odious term. 'Experimental' means or ought to mean, work which is tentative, investigatory, provisional—work done in a spirit of 'let's see what we can use this gadget for.' Nothing could be less characteristic of Mr. Hawkes, who asserted a fully formed style in his first novel, and has continued to exploit it, with increasing assurance and creative exuberance, ever since. The present book is a work of gifted maturity; it has been achieved, so far as appears, by the classically direct principle of developing one's artistic perceptions in accord with one's artistic nature, and letting the labels, along with the advertisements, fall where they may.
Review, 1701 words
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