Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes

Now the Deauville family is all but extinct. I am the last of the line and not a man but a woman. When I die--long years in the future, I assume, and of course in France--the Deauville family name, which is pronounced "dough-veal," will die as well. It is a family name that deserves extinction. It was a family of men, a family of confusion, a family in which women were at best only prized by horses, a conglomerate of men who did not know that between innocent and satyriasis there's little to choose, or who could not find it in themselves to bridge extremes. The question is what brought about the family ruin: the innocence that flowered in my father or the satyriasis that surged through the lives of my grandfather and great-grandfather? But they are one and the same, those false flourishes of manhood, and it is up to me to discover how and why it happens that lust and innocence are only two faces in the same pool, and to forgive if I can the Alaskan adventurer as I have long since forgiven the old womanizer in all his gleeful and crafty pursuit of women.

Sunny Deauville is the proprietor of Gamelands, the premier brothel of the Alaskan bush. Sex, she tells the reader, is her favorite word, "a nice word, a cute word, a tiny green snake stiff in the mouth." Johns--whom she calls "Willies"--come from all over to Gamelands, drawn by the advertisements of a stocking leg planted between antlers. But Sunny is planning to leave Gamelands and Alaska for France, because lately she has been tormented by dreams of her adventurer father, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the waters around Juneau many years before. Sunny's father, who calls himself, and insists on being called, Uncle Jake, even by his daughter, is a Connecticut-born socialite who absconded to Alaska after the stock market crash in 1929.

Much of the novel is taken up by Sunny's memories of Uncle Jake and his adventurous exploits. Arriving in Juneau in 1930, Uncle Jake remakes himself in the image of legendary Alaska adventurers like Joe Juneau and Carl Ben Eielson. No sooner does he plant his feet on the dock at Juneau than he's called on to assist in the air rescue of a hunting party ravaged by a bear. When he returns, he has with him not only the ravaged hunter but an unbelievable story of tracking and killing the enormous bear, whom he dubs "His Unholiness." Much more of the novel--perhaps too much more--is about Uncle Jake's exploits than Sunny's madameing: Uncle Jake intervenes in a domestic conflict between a Swedish settler and his indigenous wife; Uncle Jake helps a deaf couple from Connecticut begin a fox farming operation on a remote island; Uncle Jake scales an unclimbable wall in search of copper deposits.

But at times, Uncle Jake's legend outpaces his actual abilities: his interference in the domestic conflict gets the indigenous woman killed; his mine outfits fail; he drives his boat against a reef where it's stuck for a week. He has an uncanny knack for getting of danger, but which he only employs because he has an uncanny knack for getting into it. Though he has young Sunny's undying admiration, he ignores the fear and stress that the move to Alaska inflicts upon his wife Sissy until she's died of it. He is an adventurer in a particular kind of early 20th century chauvinist mode, like a British officer in India, paternalistic toward Indians, contemptuous toward the very wildness he seeks out, and completely without a sex drive. What Sunny calls his "innocence" is a kind of reaction against disorder, which takes in both the Alaskan wilds and human desires, both of which should be conquered, and when they can't, ignored.

Though there's not enough of adult Sunny and her life in the brothel, I was struck by a very strange episode, in which the madame Sunny is visited by a towering, scar-covered woman with the unlikely name of Martha Washington. "Marty" has a deep knowledge of Alaskan legends, which she speaks about at length, and though Sunny suspects at first that her encyclopedia-like recounting means that she's faking it, Marty turns out to be the real deal, her scars the evidence of a disfiguring bear attack. Marty, it seems, has arrived at Gamelands with two objectives. One, to steal Sunny's boyfriend Hank, and two, to convince her girls to quit their lives of indecent prostitution. Sunny considers the episode a kind of ambush by her father, symbolically reincarnated in a woman's body. Another ghost in a dream But the whole bit is so strange and unexplained, it seems to me the only evidence that this relatively straightforward book was written by the same author as The Beetle Leg, one of the most difficult books I've ever read.

There's a silly kind of anti-feminism to the Martha Washington character that reveals the novel's more outdated ideas about sex, I think. For one, I think it wants to make an easy comparison between wildness and sexuality that is rather stupid. Uncle Jake is a civilizing force, terrified of his own libido, but it is his daughter, Sunny, who really embraces the wilderness of human lust. Only a man could write that, I think, and only a man writing from a certain mid-to-late twentieth century vantage point. But despite that, I was totally captivated by the chauvinist Uncle Jake, and I loved the way the book manages to both offer up a crop of traditional adventure narratives and critique them. At its heart, I think Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade is a loving send-up of those stories, so masculine but sexless, like stories written for children. And I liked the complexity of Sunny's relationship with her father, with its twin threads of idolatry and hatred. Getting to see the grown-up Sunny was a little like seeing the daughter from The Man Who Loved Children grow up and find an identity outside her father's shadow.