The Passion Artist is a startling, erotic, terrifyingly honest and stylistically lush achievement, the kind of novel his readers have come to expect from John Hawkes. Once again, Hawkes focuses upon a "traveler," here a "stationary traveler," one Konrad Vost, the typical Hawkes male: the searching self, questing for meaning as defined by his relationships with the several significant women in his life. (p. 278)

Vost's most important journey … focuses upon his attempt to come to grips with his past as an only (apparently) unwanted child. We watch as this "disordered," sensitive "little trumpeter" undergoes various sexual encounters, For him, the past—his insomniac father, his homicidal mother, his lusty, brutal guardian—all that "which is gone" can be summarized by "Shame and grief. Shame and grief."

But Vost knows moments of triumph as well. He can achieve the level of the "passion artist," though, as the novel's second...