Hawkes at a Hundred

“They provoke, … the kind of love that one feels only for amazing things that could not come out of one’s own imagination at all. One loves them the more for that fact,” said John Barth of the strange and beautiful novels of John Hawkes. Hawkes’s books are filled with horses and nightmares and jokes and death and written in his rhythmic, highly visual style. In them you find, as Barth put it: “Outrageous situations and unforgettable scenes refracted through a lens of rhetoric that transfigures them into something as strange and as beautiful as anything I know in our contemporary literature.” And yet, today, he’s considered dated, passé, and difficult—a postmodern also-ran, a pretentious writer for pretentious readers past. He’s anything but, though—not postmodern, not pretentious, and still worth reading. Hawkes was born a hundred years ago, and he’s been dead since the late nineties, but his work seems to stand alone, without age, outside other writing.