Travesty

An exceptionally brilliant novel from “our most interesting writer” (Flannery O’Connor)

Travesty is John Hawkes’s most extreme vision of eroticism and comic terror. In the south of France, an elegant sports car is speeding through the night, bearing a man, his daughter, and his best friend toward a fatal crash. As he drives, the “privileged man” justifies, in a sustained monologue, his firm opinion that willed destruction is the ultimate act of the poetic imagination. “What I have in mind is...