Second Skin by John Hawkes

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the right stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

Skipper, the hero of John Hawkes' Second Skin, begins to tell what he calls the "naked history" of his life. As he writes it, he's living the high life on a tropical island, inseminating cows and hanging out with his paramour, a Black island woman he calls "Catalina Kate," and who is pregnant with his child. But this life is a late reward for Skipper, whose life, we learn, has been marked by a series of hardships and betrayals beginning with the suicide of his father, who shot himself in the head with Skipper, then a child, waiting on the other side of the bathroom door. Suicide makes something of a theme in Skipper's life; his daughter Cassandra, too, commits suicide by flinging herself off of an abandoned lighthouse. Her death is precipitated by that of her husband, Fernandez, whom Skipper himself discovers in a seedy motel, stabbed to death for being a "fairy spic."

Hawkes lays out almost the entire story in the opening chapter of Second Skin, teasing the reader with the key details and only later digging into each gruesome event, which we know each time is coming. These tragedies and betrayals have their key in Tremlow, the naval officer who commits mutiny against Skipper. Tremlow is a shadowy character, often alluded to but only briefly seen; he is a malevolent force who dances in a hula skirt and persuades the other sailors aboard the boat to beat Skipper before sailing away in the ship's lifeboats. There is no justice, no restitution, for what Tremlow does; he and the others disappear into the sea and are never heard from again, perhaps sunk, or perhaps living the kind of life that Skipper himself is allowed to live in the latter stage of his life, eating coconuts and watching hummingbirds on a tropical island. Tremlow comes to stand in for all the betrayals and violence that fall upon Skipper and his loved ones. At the site of Fernandez's death, and later Cassandra's, Skipper hallucinates a vision of the mutineer. He is the primal, inevitable force of life, which deals tragedy without reason. Skipper, for his own part, comes to seem like a "man more sinned against than sinning," an eternal victim whose courage and valiance are rooted in the suffering he undergoes.

Hawkes is a strange writer. I've read two of his other books. The Beetle Leg is one of the most inscrutable things I've ever read. Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, by contrast, is a fairly straightforward adventure novel; I devoured it. Second Skin, perhaps, falls somewhere in the middle of these two novels. Like Alaskan Skin Trade, it seems to borrow much from boy's adventure novels. And like with The Beetle Leg, at times I had trouble discerning what exactly was going on. This is, I think, the result of Hawkes' intricate, full-barreled prose and the particular un-logic that governs the plot of the book. But it also had something to do with the impenetrability of the other characters. Only Skipper has any real life, here, and perhaps the loyal mess boy Sonny, the one person whose devotion to Skipper never wavers. But the suicides, the father and Cassandra, are more mysterious, as is Skipper's contemptuous wife, Miranda. Some reason is belatedly given in Cassandra's case, but it seems like a red herring; both characters seem somehow equivalent to their final acts. (I read after finishing the book that Cassandra's miscarriage is supposed to be Skipper's child, and that the marriage with Fernandez is meant to disguise Skipper's incest with his daughter--if that's true, it was totally lost on me.) When Skipper has a vision of Cassandra, laid out on the rocks well before her death, we understand that it is inevitable, so inevitable that it obliterates whatever else might be left of her character. Nor did I understand why so many of the other characters visit cruelties upon Skipper, pelting him with rocks or beating him with tire irons. That is, I suppose, their nature, as Skipper's suffering is his.

All that, I guess, is to say that I had trouble sometimes feeling as if I had plumbed past the novel's surface level. It got me thinking about the title, Second Skin, which Skipper uses to describe the oilslicks he puts on before going out to sea. Is there a primary skin beneath this, something truer than his identity as a sailor--his long-suffering nature, even Christlikeness? And if it's true of him, what of the other characters? Is it possible to get down past the layers of Cassandra, or Catalina Kate, or poor murdered Fernandez, or the father who commits suicide while the young boy is outside the door playing his cello? Or is a second skin more like a creature emerging brand-new from a chrysalis, as Skipper does in his new and luckier life on the island?