With Virginie: Her Two Lives, Hawkes is once again playing the keeper of the crypt, decorating the sarcophagi with amorous doodles. The novel, narrated by a tremulous waif named Virginie, shuttles like a time-machine from a castle of regimented decadence in rural France (the year—significantly—is 1740, the year of Sade's birth) to a low-rent house of bawdiness in Paris (1945). Under both roofs Virginie flits about on her errands like a nest-tidying bird, bearing rapt witness to the debaucheries and sadistic rites of all these devoted sensualists. She's the Eternal Child, enveloped in a milky glow of unsullied innocence….

[Although] John Hawkes is often touted by his admirers as a comic writer, his touch is far from nimble, his manner seldom slangy or racy. Steeped in a cultured funk, his novels strive to be erotically rich and dark and Continental—pillow books for postmodernists….

Not surprisingly, then, the...