Whistlejacket

by John Hawkes

While investigating his mentor's life and death, Michael, a voyeuristic fashion photographer, travels through a Dionysian landscape where sex is daydream, women and horses share the same erotic power, and perversity is the rule. An inventive mix of biography, history, erotica, and classic whodunit, "Whistlejacket" is John Hawkes at his best as he blurs distinctions between death and desire, image and language, art and morality.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

208 pages, Paperback

First published July 27, 1988

About the author

John 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.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Hawkes’s title The Blood Oranges always triggers the following memory: I was eight or thereabouts, pootling for sweets in a little shop beside the funeral parlour and draper’s shop. Between the curtain and draper’s was a little sneak lane, giving easier access to the suburb. After buying a pack of Parma Violets and Refreshers, I headed for the lane, only to see a gang of yoofs in shellsuits swearing and kicking the wall. Back then I was courageous. I took risks, I walked into the valley of death. So, stuffing the sweets down my coat, I barrelled down the lane, expecting to be blocked, interrogated, robbed, beaten, raped, stabbed in the anus. A few little barbs were tossed in my direction. Nothing serious. No maternal slanders. Then I felt an attack of citrus on my left cheek. Someone had thrown an orange fragment at me! And the peel. I was being attacked by health-conscious bullies! Or was the sacrifice of this orange slice a protest against fruits—would they have tossed a Yorkie chunk, for instance, which was more likely to blind me? Whatever, I was burning. It was acid! It was semen! It was alcopops! My face was going to melt off! I ran down the lane, wiping my face, crying. So thanks, John Hawkes for triggering that one. Whistlejacket is the first Hawkes for me: nothing special. I loved the sensual, flowing prose, the elusive narrator and his sexy, stately-home sisters, but the middle chapters clung to meandering descriptions of dead-end set-pieces, and the last part was a biliously English description of a foxhunt that thoroughly stirred my chunder. Very ornate, dismissible work.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fashion photography and fox hunts, two forms of pursuit. Why is that books about equestrian culture are so sexually freighted? Equestrian culture being something I know absolutely nothing about and have little less interest in, but Hawkes' ability to absolutely overload his carefully studied scenes, precisely arranged yet thrashing with unforgettable images of the macabre and licentious, makes this a slow-burn throat grip. And with so much more restraint and decorum than Kosinski's related thematics in the much more questionable Passion Play. Though Hawkes is cagier in general, for all the intensity of each tableaux, the overall picture they form remains a little more evasive.

[Robert Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

An erratic, overlooked novel from the Hawkes oeuvre that's stuffed with so many big Themes that they seep out and stain your shirt. The current running through all of them is the novel's incorporation of sport with prey. In a sexual liaison as in a foxhunt, play and predation - spectacle and voyeurism. The various engrossments of the physical form - sexual excitement and curiosity and awe that can be brought upon by the suggestion of the exposed human skin or an anatomized mare hung swaying over a trough.

[Rick Seery · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had not read a Hawkes this late...

Somehow more readable yet as uncompromising as always. Dense description that is slave to detail.

Trust Hawkes to amusingly but seriously turn the racy mainstream equestrian-erotica [probably more conspicuous than erotica, but anyway...] cum thriller that were then in popular vogue [Jilly Cooper, I guess] completely on its head, and lay the elements out in metaphysical abeyance and the thrill of enticing structure.

I don't believe in genius - but Hawkes is singular and cryptic, and his dialogue seems to only deepen the mystery. He is probably the most significant American novelist after Faulkner in terms of daring and influence. Damn, what a writer.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read Travesty in college, and hadn't touched Hawkes since. Picked this up at the library for 25 cents due to the Barthelme blurb on the back. All I can say is what a badass. The Stubbs painting story flashback section is nuts. I'll never look at a horse the same way again. Bonus points for a few flourishes about photography that are very insightful.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

sometimes the world is a film set and you're the director — only the problem is that most of the actors have gone home and the ones remaining have phoned it in.

Doesn't live up to some of Hawkes' other fiction (Travesty remains undefeated in that regard) but in every sentence it is clear that he is so technically skilled. no wonder he was a great teacher.

[Petrina]

George Stubbs chapter; chapter 3 (grandfather)

[Anneliz · Rating 5 out of 5]

haunting, great, interesting (and lots of accurate stuff about riding!) Really well-done.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Hawkes interview from the time of Whistlejacket, Conjuctions, Spring 1989:

http://www.conjunctions.com/archive.htm