Travesty

Travesty

<p><strong><strong>An exceptionally brilliant novel from “our most interesting writer” (Flannery O’Connor)</strong></strong></p><em>Travesty</em> 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, <em>Travesty</em> is one of the most cruelly and vibrantly ironic works to be found in twentieth-century literature.