[John Hawkes, a] prolific, well-regarded author of modernist fiction, has in "Virginie: Her Two Lives" written what is at once a parody, pastiche and examination of erotic prose, the literature of arousal.

It is an indubitably original and inventive undertaking, superbly written by a man totally in control of his effects. In one fundamental way it is different from the genre it is founded upon; examining the difference is, I think, the object of the exercise. At its center is an untouched innocence, close to but independent of the prevailing debaucheries. (But debaucheries, I see, is as loaded a word as pornography, which is in turn as dangerous, imprecise and explosive as a sawed-off shotgun. Make that the prevailing erotic goings-on.)…

It needs to be said that this is literary sexuality whose tanglings are so swaddled in crypto-poetical prose that the arousal factor is significantly below that of...