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Second Skin
"John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should be more widely read."—Saul Bellow
Skipper, an ex-World War II naval Lieutenant and the narrator of Second Skin,interweaves past and present—what he refers to as his "naked
history"—in a series of episodes that tell the story of a volatile life
marked by pitiful losses, as well as a more elusive, overwhelming, joy.
The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of
his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The
present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he
works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the
innocence with which he faced the tragedies of his earlier life.
Combining unflinching descriptions of suffering with his sense of
beauty, Hawkes is a master of nimble and sensuous prose who makes the
awful and mundane fantastic, and occasionally makes the fantastic
surreal.
249 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1964
27 people are currently reading
1665 people want to read
About the author
John Hawkes
109 books192 followersJohn Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
January 20, 2023
Second Skin is a dark nonlinear story modeled on the Greek tragedies.
The hero is surrounded by death… He abides in an utter desolation and is thoroughly unhappy…
But gradually, bit by bit, his twisted confessions begin to reveal tenebrous secrets and it becomes obvious that his misery is an effect of his own monstrosity… And eventually he finds happiness in the utopia of fantastic delirium… And he hides behind the second skin of paranoia.
Madness plays a role of Deus ex machina admirably.
For it is time now to recall that sad little prophetic passage from my schoolboy’s copybook with its boyish valor and its antiquity, and to admit that the task of memory has only brightened these few brave words, and to confess that even before my father’s suicide and my mother’s death I always knew myself destined for this particular journey, always knew this speech to be the one I would deliver from an empty promontory or in an empty grove and to no audience, since of course history is a dream already dreamt and destroyed.
The hero is surrounded by death… He abides in an utter desolation and is thoroughly unhappy…
Anyone who has gotten down on his knees to vomit has discovered, if only by accident, the position of prayer. So that terrible noise I was making must have been the noise of prayer, and the effect, as the spasms faded and the stomach went dry, was no doubt similar to the peace that follows prayer. In my own way I was contrite enough, certainly, had worked hard enough there in the rubble to deserve well the few moments when a little peace hung over me in the wake of the storm that had passed.
But gradually, bit by bit, his twisted confessions begin to reveal tenebrous secrets and it becomes obvious that his misery is an effect of his own monstrosity… And eventually he finds happiness in the utopia of fantastic delirium… And he hides behind the second skin of paranoia.
Madness plays a role of Deus ex machina admirably.
July 27, 2009
Yeah, what the hell. Why not? I love books about characters that morbidly exist in the wake of a loved one's suicide. I love misery. God, that sounds so typically melodramatic. Maybe I mean that I love light being made of human misery and suffering.
Some days I wake up, and I can see nothing but the comedic aspect of life's ridiculous restrictions; poverty, biological disintegration, regret, doubt, illness, failure, humility, disappointment, etc. I want at least the delusion that I can exert any control over my own perspective, that I can giggle in the face of complete and total suffering. Or maybe I can just read a piece of fiction about it, and relate to this shared human condition. Blah, blah, blah, etc. John Hawkes is stylistic candy. As Mr. Gaddis once said "his sentences are events unto themselves".
update:
Seeing as how every time I picked up this book I was either hungover or drunk, I can't blame Hawkes for being too aimless or opaque. The story has its more engaging moments. Hawkes' blends dada absurdism and Lynchian ominousness together, and that combination seems to result in an awkward balance. Once again Camus's influence is probably stronger than it ever has been. And I must continue to stress the fact that whatever is seemingly omitted from Hawkes' stories is done so in a very deliberate manner. Even when he isn't at his finest, which Second Skin certainly isn't, he still manages to display a solid enough intention through his prose.
Alright, I'm done. God, I'm not even drunk yet.
Some days I wake up, and I can see nothing but the comedic aspect of life's ridiculous restrictions; poverty, biological disintegration, regret, doubt, illness, failure, humility, disappointment, etc. I want at least the delusion that I can exert any control over my own perspective, that I can giggle in the face of complete and total suffering. Or maybe I can just read a piece of fiction about it, and relate to this shared human condition. Blah, blah, blah, etc. John Hawkes is stylistic candy. As Mr. Gaddis once said "his sentences are events unto themselves".
update:
Seeing as how every time I picked up this book I was either hungover or drunk, I can't blame Hawkes for being too aimless or opaque. The story has its more engaging moments. Hawkes' blends dada absurdism and Lynchian ominousness together, and that combination seems to result in an awkward balance. Once again Camus's influence is probably stronger than it ever has been. And I must continue to stress the fact that whatever is seemingly omitted from Hawkes' stories is done so in a very deliberate manner. Even when he isn't at his finest, which Second Skin certainly isn't, he still manages to display a solid enough intention through his prose.
Alright, I'm done. God, I'm not even drunk yet.
March 17, 2016
" Overhead the dawn was beginning to possess the sky, squadrons of gray geese lumbered through the blackness, and I was walking on pebbles, balancing and rolling forward on the ocean's cast-up marbles, or wet and cold was struggling across stray balustrades of shale. At my shoulder was the hump of the shore itself – tree roots, hollows of pubic moss, dead violets – underfoot the beach – tricky curvatures of stone, slush of ground shell, waterspouts, sudden clefts and crevices, pools that reflected bright eyes, big smile, foolish hat. Far in the distance I could see the cold white thumb of the condemned lighthouse. "
For Hawkes, words are as concrete a part of the Natural world as earth, rock, the shadows of spring light on winter trees, spreading dark veins across the pavements. His sentences have a physical presence I find nowhere else in literature. In the short passage above he uses all the common tricks of alliteration, assonance – blackness, balancing, marbles, balustrades – and all the rest, to create something somewhere between sound and script, you feel it in your mouth like Molloy's sucking-stones.
I find with much of Hawkes' work, particularly in the earlier stages of his career, the first 20-30 pages are read through fog. I stumble, lose my bearings, until small points of clarity coalesce and cut a clearing, or reveal a plot. But I trust him, and I enjoy being constructively confused.
I was, at times, reminded of Under the Volcano. Something is similar in Lowry and Hawkes' prose, though I cannot quite put my finger on what it is. Something about the weight of it, the density of each line.
If I have a criticism it is a personal one - my own dislike of certain types of mythologizing that often orbit around desire and loss, and the performativity of it all. But this is a minor quibble, and one that did nothing to dampen my enjoyment of the text.
The edition I had has a rather sweet preface by Jeffrey Eugenides, read at Hawkes' funeral, as Jeffrey studied under Hawkes at Brown. The back cover also contains a quote from Bernhard Malamud stating that he feels it to be Hawkes' best book, and a "magnificent work of the imagination". These points may have some persuasive power for you, or they may not. For me, I respect both these writers, though place Malamud significantly above Jeff, and was pleased to find myself in agreement with them.
I would, without hesitation, label this a masterpiece. It deserves to be read.
For Hawkes, words are as concrete a part of the Natural world as earth, rock, the shadows of spring light on winter trees, spreading dark veins across the pavements. His sentences have a physical presence I find nowhere else in literature. In the short passage above he uses all the common tricks of alliteration, assonance – blackness, balancing, marbles, balustrades – and all the rest, to create something somewhere between sound and script, you feel it in your mouth like Molloy's sucking-stones.
I find with much of Hawkes' work, particularly in the earlier stages of his career, the first 20-30 pages are read through fog. I stumble, lose my bearings, until small points of clarity coalesce and cut a clearing, or reveal a plot. But I trust him, and I enjoy being constructively confused.
I was, at times, reminded of Under the Volcano. Something is similar in Lowry and Hawkes' prose, though I cannot quite put my finger on what it is. Something about the weight of it, the density of each line.
If I have a criticism it is a personal one - my own dislike of certain types of mythologizing that often orbit around desire and loss, and the performativity of it all. But this is a minor quibble, and one that did nothing to dampen my enjoyment of the text.
The edition I had has a rather sweet preface by Jeffrey Eugenides, read at Hawkes' funeral, as Jeffrey studied under Hawkes at Brown. The back cover also contains a quote from Bernhard Malamud stating that he feels it to be Hawkes' best book, and a "magnificent work of the imagination". These points may have some persuasive power for you, or they may not. For me, I respect both these writers, though place Malamud significantly above Jeff, and was pleased to find myself in agreement with them.
I would, without hesitation, label this a masterpiece. It deserves to be read.
May 10, 2013
A fugue of memory and loss, a series of episodes in spectral places that hover in the dark, suffused in sorrow and menace.
While this drifts forwards and back through time like the fantastic Death, Sleep & the Traveler, and maintains the elegant unearthly stillness of Hawkes' descriptions of each place and action, real or perhaps slightly imagined, this one drifts in larger chunks, with less sense of momentum between sections (as each must build itself up anew). It took me a full 50 pages for the style to click, before I started to lose myself in its voluptuously desolate sense of place, before it fully cast its spell. Still, even more so than Sleep, Death, and the Traveler, there's a kind of distance from everyone here, even from the first person narrator. It's hard to connect, a ponderous lyricism intercedes and stifles, each faint outline of character is cut-off and isolated in the sucking void that sweeps in around everything here. Of course, Hawkes claimed not to care about plot or character at all. What did he care about, place and mood perhaps, or the little warm space a word can hollow around itself on the page? For all of these are where Second Skin excels, fevers, gleams darkly in the endless night.
While this drifts forwards and back through time like the fantastic Death, Sleep & the Traveler, and maintains the elegant unearthly stillness of Hawkes' descriptions of each place and action, real or perhaps slightly imagined, this one drifts in larger chunks, with less sense of momentum between sections (as each must build itself up anew). It took me a full 50 pages for the style to click, before I started to lose myself in its voluptuously desolate sense of place, before it fully cast its spell. Still, even more so than Sleep, Death, and the Traveler, there's a kind of distance from everyone here, even from the first person narrator. It's hard to connect, a ponderous lyricism intercedes and stifles, each faint outline of character is cut-off and isolated in the sucking void that sweeps in around everything here. Of course, Hawkes claimed not to care about plot or character at all. What did he care about, place and mood perhaps, or the little warm space a word can hollow around itself on the page? For all of these are where Second Skin excels, fevers, gleams darkly in the endless night.
November 26, 2018
One of the most unique books I've ever read. As Flannery O'Connor perfectly put it: you suffer Hawkes's books "like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can't. The reader even has that slight feeling of suffocation that you have when you can't wake up and some evil is being worked on you. This . . . I might have been dreaming myself."
August 30, 2012
I would give this five stars, but this book nailed me with its density. Hawkes is a master of grabbing by the hair and guiding the head around the room to the most spectacular details and oddities happening where I just wasn't looking (couldn't look). He's in control here and a large part of this book was just too verbally slick for me to imagine. My mind wanted to read on its own terms, but Hawkes wants us to play by his rules from the get-go. Well, that incapacity to escape is my fault, perhaps--not the best book to read on the bus and the train. Demands silence. Hawkes would be disappointed in me. So I finished the book and have read it, but I feel like I've read the skin of an onion and I know that when I read it again next year--yeah, already added it to my read again list--I will be moving one layer closer to these episodes. Or maybe its not an onion, but a body or an organ, or a layer of the finest skin.
June 10, 2018
I'm more than a little tongue-tied when it comes to this book. As in, I could probably sum up the events that take place in the narrative, but how that relates to the underside of things (and let me tell you there's an underside) is much more difficult. I won't even pretend to know; what I do know is the book is suggestive of so much more than what 'Skip', the main character, decides to tell us.
Open a page of this book at random, and you'll see some of the most intense, closely observed writing I've ever read. Here is Skip, somewhere on a North Atlantic coastal island, in winter, walking toward the sea: "From the very first I walked with my light and swinging step and chin high, walked away from the house ready to meet all my island world, walked actually with a bounce despite the wind, the crazy interference of the black rubber coat, the weight of my poor cold slobbering white navy shoes drenched in a crunchy puddle which I failed to see behind the kennel of the sleeping Labradors. The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces and dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see at a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened piled of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single live rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his wattles, every moment or two trying to crow in the wind, trying grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the day in the empty yard of some dead fisherman...Oh, it was a spread before me and all mine, the strange island of bitter wind and blighted blueberries and empty nests."
More like a prose poem than a novel, and it is more or less continual throughout the book. Hawkes substitutes this for exposition, these layers of description which slowly accumulate and suggest emotional states and character boundaries and repressed feeling. Skip, writing from the far side of his experiences, relates the episodes that have brought him to the place he is now--unnamed, but a tropical island where he subsists as an artificial inseminator for the island's cattle. Bizarre, man...that's really bizarre.
But while he may have achieved some kind of peace at this stage, the trip getting there is excruciating....well, suggestively excruciating, at any rate. But these episodes he relates are unordered, scattered in time and in memory--there is an attempted mutiny aboard Skip's vessel in WWII, his wife's suicide, his daughter's marriage, and a final tragic stop on the coastal island. But dissected, none of these events appear, superficially, to carry the import and sense of dread Hawkes is able to elicit through his prose. And I begin to understand the Skip may not be the most reliable of narrators.
Simply said, this is not a book where this happens and then that happens and then this. And it isn't just that it's non-linear (though it is that as well), but that Hawkes has constructed a kind of prose cubist portrait of Skip, has separated him into blocks of movement and time and pieced him back together again to give us something more than just a story of a man obsessed with his daughter. A book that will definitely go on my re-read list, and I look forward to reading more of Hawkes work.
Open a page of this book at random, and you'll see some of the most intense, closely observed writing I've ever read. Here is Skip, somewhere on a North Atlantic coastal island, in winter, walking toward the sea: "From the very first I walked with my light and swinging step and chin high, walked away from the house ready to meet all my island world, walked actually with a bounce despite the wind, the crazy interference of the black rubber coat, the weight of my poor cold slobbering white navy shoes drenched in a crunchy puddle which I failed to see behind the kennel of the sleeping Labradors. The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces and dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see at a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened piled of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single live rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his wattles, every moment or two trying to crow in the wind, trying grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the day in the empty yard of some dead fisherman...Oh, it was a spread before me and all mine, the strange island of bitter wind and blighted blueberries and empty nests."
More like a prose poem than a novel, and it is more or less continual throughout the book. Hawkes substitutes this for exposition, these layers of description which slowly accumulate and suggest emotional states and character boundaries and repressed feeling. Skip, writing from the far side of his experiences, relates the episodes that have brought him to the place he is now--unnamed, but a tropical island where he subsists as an artificial inseminator for the island's cattle. Bizarre, man...that's really bizarre.
But while he may have achieved some kind of peace at this stage, the trip getting there is excruciating....well, suggestively excruciating, at any rate. But these episodes he relates are unordered, scattered in time and in memory--there is an attempted mutiny aboard Skip's vessel in WWII, his wife's suicide, his daughter's marriage, and a final tragic stop on the coastal island. But dissected, none of these events appear, superficially, to carry the import and sense of dread Hawkes is able to elicit through his prose. And I begin to understand the Skip may not be the most reliable of narrators.
Simply said, this is not a book where this happens and then that happens and then this. And it isn't just that it's non-linear (though it is that as well), but that Hawkes has constructed a kind of prose cubist portrait of Skip, has separated him into blocks of movement and time and pieced him back together again to give us something more than just a story of a man obsessed with his daughter. A book that will definitely go on my re-read list, and I look forward to reading more of Hawkes work.
January 12, 2021
Skipper, hapless and seasick Navy man, bumbles around plagued by closeness of death since childhood, while infantilizing his daughter Cassandra (compare to Greek namesake), whose faith in him hovers at a lukewarm tolerance, until it becomes something sharper. Skipper yearns to always do the right thing, but always falls flat. Suicides abound in his life but he still keeps pasting a smile on his face. The action is primarily juxtaposed on two islands: one a cold gothic rock of impending doom peopled by human predators, where Skipper experiences his final crushing loss (yet that also frees him); the other a bizarre benevolent white father warm-water paradise situation where Skipper finds solace as a giver of the 'seeds of life', thus eclipsing his previous role as perpetual witness to the 'seeds of death'. Story is refracted through a kaleidoscopic lens of time, in shortish segments, keeping the pace moving along at a good clip. Hawkes' prose is earthy and visceral but never overbearing, scraping dread up in the reader's mind, where knowledge of final outcomes appears up front and the telling of the how stretches its lean muscular limbs out to the end.
I was an old child of the moon and lay sprawled on the night, musing and half-exposed in the suspended and public posture of all those night travelers who are without beds, those who sleep on public benches or curl into the corners of out-of-date railway coaches, all those who dream their uncovered dreams and try to sleep on their hands.
January 12, 2011
Fascination/obsession and strangeness form the foundation of Second Skin. The structure of the novel is deconstructed to the very edge of nonsense and then pushed one step further passed the realm of hallucination into the soft substance of pure art. At no time did the writing feel self-indulgent or secretive. (Perhaps one of the most difficult tests of surrealist texts.) Rather, the prose is open and bold - "naked history" is the desire of the narrator.
Oddly enough - despite Hawkes masterful adherence to experimental/post-modern constraints - something like a plot emerges, but as a reader, I found myself questioning my own need for a narrative structure and rather enjoyed the pure beauty and devotion that Hawkes dedicates to his writing on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence basis. I don't care to explore the argument as to whether what Second Skin arrives at is a type of hyper-realism; the book doesn't preoccupy itself with any doubts of its vision.
That being said Second Skin is an inspiring book. The kind of book I hope to write someday. I would recommend it to anyone interested in frontier of fiction - the limits of what writing (and our perception of it) is currently able to achieve; it is truly a masterpiece.
Oddly enough - despite Hawkes masterful adherence to experimental/post-modern constraints - something like a plot emerges, but as a reader, I found myself questioning my own need for a narrative structure and rather enjoyed the pure beauty and devotion that Hawkes dedicates to his writing on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence basis. I don't care to explore the argument as to whether what Second Skin arrives at is a type of hyper-realism; the book doesn't preoccupy itself with any doubts of its vision.
That being said Second Skin is an inspiring book. The kind of book I hope to write someday. I would recommend it to anyone interested in frontier of fiction - the limits of what writing (and our perception of it) is currently able to achieve; it is truly a masterpiece.
October 5, 2021
Very possibly my favorite Hawkes novel so far. Incredible prose — stylish, musical, surreal. The belly bumping scene alone was worth the price of admission. And the air of regret, sadness, grief hanging over everything and the abundance of odd humor in the face of it all was oddly very life-affirming. Baffling and beautiful work.
Highly recommended. Reading aloud strongly advised.
Highly recommended. Reading aloud strongly advised.
November 14, 2008
This is basically the greatest novel I've read in about 15 years - the writing is like the greatest parts of Pynchon and Coover tempered with the beautiful glissandos of Kathryn Davis - just that dazzling firework proze that never feels flashy or pomo.
February 4, 2025
John Hawkes at his alleged best.
We have Skipper (Edward) in a "heroic" battle for survival. Only issue with survival is that staying alive is at the literal expense of everyone around him (save a modest few).
We have a sympathetic character, but not very mindful of the pain of others. Like, we sympathize with the main character based solely off what we are told. We are only given one side of a story.
There are some wacky parts (belly bouncing contest, missing dead wife's funeral) and there are some seriously messed up parts (suicides).
On the back of the book, the story is literally outline for the reader. The story takes place in two timelines and Hawkes expects the reader to catch on. I feel this is done very well.
Like Moby Dick, we know when the climax arrives (Ahab/Whale). We patiently get dumped exorbitant amount of what I call, "Tim Burton" prose where everything is given the most decrepit descriptions, that lead to Skipper's daughters' (Cassandra, or Candy) suicide. We know when she's about to jump out of the phallic light tower, but this does not make the process any easier to digest. To survive.
The only use of the term Second Skin took place during the end when our characters had to put on "oil skins", but I believe the title could emphasize the shedding of a skin that reptiles do. We encounter many. Even an iguana that mounts the cover girl's (Catalina Kate) back. Its claws digging into her skin and after a light attempt if taking the critter off, we find Skipper waiting, surviving, outlasting until the lizard crawls off her back. What a weird segment.
The true climax takes place after Cassandra's suicide. Skipper is given (allegedly as he never looks) a jar that is suppose to have Cassandras fetus from an orgy a few months prior (a lot to take in).
By the end, somehow the entire picture comes into focus and ends on a great note. Skipper has escaped death and has a child with Kate.
Skipper is called the A.I. (Artificial Inseminator) and I am inclined to reach (no grounds really, just a thought) that Skipper was incapable of bearing children of his own. The attachment between Skipper and Casandra on its surface comes of incestuous until that thought crosses my mind. Even the child from Kate was "darker than her". This leads me to believe the baby is Kate and Sonny's.
Other scenes of note:
Naked AWOL soldiers
A duck and their children marching but described as Nazi soldiers marching
Skipper siphoning bull semen to inseminate a cow
I don't know. The more I write about it, the more I think about what I read. The book employs the color green and a source from Doland J. Greiner states that the first chapter of The Lime Twig is extremely similar to the entirety of Second Skin. What is funny to me is that was the only chapter I remember of the Twig.
This book is highly unquotable due to the way Hawkes employs his prose. Unlike anything in his canon that I have read up to this point, this is his most dense.
This is very close to taking top spot, but will ultimately intermingle with The Passion Artist and Death, Sleep & The Traveler, both my current favorites.
Writing a review on the PC for the first time. Be nice.
We have Skipper (Edward) in a "heroic" battle for survival. Only issue with survival is that staying alive is at the literal expense of everyone around him (save a modest few).
We have a sympathetic character, but not very mindful of the pain of others. Like, we sympathize with the main character based solely off what we are told. We are only given one side of a story.
There are some wacky parts (belly bouncing contest, missing dead wife's funeral) and there are some seriously messed up parts (suicides).
On the back of the book, the story is literally outline for the reader. The story takes place in two timelines and Hawkes expects the reader to catch on. I feel this is done very well.
Like Moby Dick, we know when the climax arrives (Ahab/Whale). We patiently get dumped exorbitant amount of what I call, "Tim Burton" prose where everything is given the most decrepit descriptions, that lead to Skipper's daughters' (Cassandra, or Candy) suicide. We know when she's about to jump out of the phallic light tower, but this does not make the process any easier to digest. To survive.
The only use of the term Second Skin took place during the end when our characters had to put on "oil skins", but I believe the title could emphasize the shedding of a skin that reptiles do. We encounter many. Even an iguana that mounts the cover girl's (Catalina Kate) back. Its claws digging into her skin and after a light attempt if taking the critter off, we find Skipper waiting, surviving, outlasting until the lizard crawls off her back. What a weird segment.
The true climax takes place after Cassandra's suicide. Skipper is given (allegedly as he never looks) a jar that is suppose to have Cassandras fetus from an orgy a few months prior (a lot to take in).
By the end, somehow the entire picture comes into focus and ends on a great note. Skipper has escaped death and has a child with Kate.
Skipper is called the A.I. (Artificial Inseminator) and I am inclined to reach (no grounds really, just a thought) that Skipper was incapable of bearing children of his own. The attachment between Skipper and Casandra on its surface comes of incestuous until that thought crosses my mind. Even the child from Kate was "darker than her". This leads me to believe the baby is Kate and Sonny's.
Other scenes of note:
Naked AWOL soldiers
A duck and their children marching but described as Nazi soldiers marching
Skipper siphoning bull semen to inseminate a cow
I don't know. The more I write about it, the more I think about what I read. The book employs the color green and a source from Doland J. Greiner states that the first chapter of The Lime Twig is extremely similar to the entirety of Second Skin. What is funny to me is that was the only chapter I remember of the Twig.
This book is highly unquotable due to the way Hawkes employs his prose. Unlike anything in his canon that I have read up to this point, this is his most dense.
This is very close to taking top spot, but will ultimately intermingle with The Passion Artist and Death, Sleep & The Traveler, both my current favorites.
Writing a review on the PC for the first time. Be nice.
April 17, 2019
Dense and allusive, Papa Cue Ball's story drips with death and fecundity. Thin on plot, jumping around in time, the overall effect is a feverish, surreal myth. Hawkes wrote weird little books.
August 4, 2019
ode of narration, Skipper (who looks like Mussolini) with seeds of death tries to plant the seeds of life. sad narrative about loss and death, lost lives and good deeds
March 9, 2019
every disparate chapter has at least one image or scene brightly illuminated by a stunning prose spotlight; each of the dramatic vignettes disclose a piece of the small personal tragedy. sleight of hand tricks abound, but there is no reflection here - Hawkes is not a thinker in the same way that Pynchon is, he is a more like a baroque painter; only concerned with the oils.
“The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran Church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces in dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see it a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened pile of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single large rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his waddles, every moment or two trying to crow into the wind, trying to grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the dawn in the empty yard of some dead fisherman....oh, it was all spread before me and all mine, this strange island of bitter wind and blighted blueberries and empty nests.”
Bizarre, no bullshit, coincidence - this is the second book in my last three that has a character who artificially inseminates cows. Isn’t that fucking odd?
Travesty>Second Skin>Lime Twig
“The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran Church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces in dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see it a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened pile of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single large rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his waddles, every moment or two trying to crow into the wind, trying to grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the dawn in the empty yard of some dead fisherman....oh, it was all spread before me and all mine, this strange island of bitter wind and blighted blueberries and empty nests.”
Bizarre, no bullshit, coincidence - this is the second book in my last three that has a character who artificially inseminates cows. Isn’t that fucking odd?
Travesty>Second Skin>Lime Twig
September 4, 2025
Mike Lisk, a connection of mine here, reviewed this book and quoted Flannery O’Connor who said that you suffer Hawkes’s books like a dream.
That grabbed me and I thought suffering a dream sounded exactly like what I wanted, so I borrowed this one from the library.
Simultaneously with this book, I was reading David Shields’s biography of JD Salinger. It didn’t dawn on me until midway through that I was reading two books either about or written by men who were traumatized by World War II.
Second Skin is like reading a David Lynch movie - characters morph into other characters and each scene feels like it’s in a fog. The whole text reads like a long prose poem, and it’s beautiful and strange and I couldn’t walk away from it.
So now I have suffered the dream and I have to go find more John Hawkes to read.
That grabbed me and I thought suffering a dream sounded exactly like what I wanted, so I borrowed this one from the library.
Simultaneously with this book, I was reading David Shields’s biography of JD Salinger. It didn’t dawn on me until midway through that I was reading two books either about or written by men who were traumatized by World War II.
Second Skin is like reading a David Lynch movie - characters morph into other characters and each scene feels like it’s in a fog. The whole text reads like a long prose poem, and it’s beautiful and strange and I couldn’t walk away from it.
So now I have suffered the dream and I have to go find more John Hawkes to read.
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July 12, 2008Wow, this is a motherf*&$er of a book. Why no one told me about this until I was 30 I have no idea. It's like they hid this one from you. As equally towering as the highest achievements of Delillo or Pynchon, those guys should pass the PoMo crown to Hawkes for a spell. I can't find sentences as perfect as the ones in this book pretty much anywhere. A solid gold wretched story about one man's beyond brutal life -- whether the brutality is from himself or from life is often debatable and his eventual (and earned) redemption. This is as good as it gets, people.
November 16, 2007
Papa Cueball seems to have lived in all that darkest most desolate regions where sea meets land, his recollections an absurd collage of snowball fights, car chases on beaches, abandoned lighthouses, mixed with incest, suicide, and murder. Dark but humorous in very disconcerting way.
March 13, 2020
I'd heard the name John Hawkes but hadn't read anything by him. This is some damn fine writing. He masters a contradiction in tone which fills in parts of the non-linear story.
Giving it 5 stars but don't know many people who I would recommend it to.
Giving it 5 stars but don't know many people who I would recommend it to.
October 11, 2025
I will reread this, whenever it is you stumble upon this, and properly sing its praises; it is an eternal work of inscrutable beauty that I owe pledging witness to. Hawkes at his tippy-top, a term I pick up at a fancy to-do.
Jelly much?
Jelly much?
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February 6, 2025truly god awful but mama raised a masochist not a quitter
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July 27, 2022I discovered John Hawkes back around the ‘60s, and rereading “Second Skin” now reminds me what an excellent writer he was, spinning sentences, paragraphs, and chapters into patterns that are sensual, sensuous, and spellbinding. While his reverence for Nabokov is obvious, his vision is (even) darker and his sense of American vulgarity is (even) more scathing. He was a unique artist who should be far better known.
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May 20, 2019I don’t know how to rate the book. Nightmare and dream qualities. I love the writing. The narrator is withholding a monstrosity to the end. I like an unreliable narrator. Not for the faint or easily offended/disturbed.
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June 10, 2025(｡◕‿‿◕｡)
ԅ(≖‿≖ԅ)
(_゜_゜_)
༼ ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ༽
ԅ(≖‿≖ԅ)
(_゜_゜_)
༼ ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ༽
November 18, 2021
he says his story may be no more than changes in the wind. is this an indirect mission statement for hawkes' writing generally? john hawkes writes with a movement-in-stillness and density of detail that opens tiny turns of phrase into entire worlds and feels like passing constipation to read - another critic called it the sting of hard alcohol, i think their comparison is more appealing. but hard alcohol is not difficult to put down, the thing is in keeping it. you can't put a word of john hawkes down without a little work, once it's there it keeps no question there. why do i hold these particle boards and broad white window frames in such high regard? i have nothing intelligent to say today. i am only writing words. i have only words - the still voice. everything is the same. all you experience, all that passes, all remains the same. unchanged unchanged unchanging. i am not patient enough for john hawkes. i wish i'd gotten into him in my school days. but i didn't . and the second best day to build rome, the saying you all know goes, the next best day to build it in's today. today i start john hawkes, because my last encounter with john hawkes, tho it feels quite the same some ways, back there in the farback of my head, doesn't count, or was forgotten for the moment, and while the second best day to declare one's on their way is today the better still be the yester. to hell with it. i think i will reread this book in a few weeks' time, is the thing. i think i will reread it this summer, and see what else it has to give me. good book john hawkes, a strange little life you didn't live out there on the sea.
April 24, 2008
for all the extent novels that explore the hidden but ever present wonder and greatness of humanity, there needs to exist a book like this. Know that sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you see a parent at a mall smack their kid in public and know its not gonna be any better for the kid at home? Reading second skin is like that to the 100th degree, only Hawkes drags you with him into the home as well. The impotence of the main character is often sympathetic, but disheartening as well. Actually "disheartening" would probably be the best way to describe this novel. A stylish, moving, gut-wrenching brain-wringing disheartening novel. Read with care.
August 29, 2007
Hawkes is an author that writes sentences that you want to read a hundred times. Each read reveals new meaning within the sentence and adds to the novel's building beauty. At times the plot or action may not make much sense, but it doesn't really matter. Just reading the next sentence keeps you going.
July 4, 2016
Did not finish the second chapter. Too bizarre. The narrator described a woman in excruciating detail and interacted with her as though she was his lover and the woman calls him her boyfriend, but they turn out to be father and daughter. Very hard to read. Not finishing the book.
January 31, 2022
Very interesting and dense, the language in this book is second to none. It reads as poetry at times but still is very unsettling, after all, it is about bloodline and suicide. John Hawkes is another writer that I want to read quite a few from this year.
January 3, 2010
How to express this? Not quite like the book I will write, but a book I might -- and maybe will -- read again and again. Beautiful, terrible, odd, rich, sweet and uncanny. A work of art.
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