Travesty

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 an ‘accident’ so perfectly contrived that it will be unique, spectacular and instantaneous, a physical counterpart to that vision in which it was in fact conceived. Concerned with sex, myth, the imagination, and the absurd, Travesty is one of the most cruelly and vibrantly ironic works to be found in twentieth-century literature.