The preoccupation with sexual anxiety and impotence may mislead readers into seeing The Passion Artist as a continuation of Hawkes's trilogy: Blood Oranges, Death, Sleep and the Traveler, Travesty. But the new novel has little of their sinuous, suave, playful sophistication, and very few moments of perverse bliss. It represents, rather, an altogether conscious and very powerful return, after 30 years, to the bleak, devastated fictive world and the psychic cripplings of The Cannibal.

[The] pervasive misogyny is that of an intense, dynamic authorial imagination, and it is even more explicit than Faulkner's. The Passion Artist is, whatever its deficiencies, a serious work of art.

The differences in style, as one looks back to the opening of The Cannibal, are radical. Highly controlled statement has replaced metaphor….

It would be idle to demand of a highly conscious and expert novelist in his 50s the primitive, even atavistic energies of...