The Review of Contemporary Fiction

An Irish Eye by John Hawkes and Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse by Lesley Marx
Robert L. McLaughlin

John Hawkes. An Irish Eye. Viking, 1997. 159 pp. $22.95; Lesley Marx. Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1997. 244 pp. $39.50.

John Hawkes is yet another contemporary American novelist who has unaccountably received relatively little scholarly attention. What a pleasure, then, to read Lesley Marx’s study of Hawkes’s career. In this smart, readable, and compelling book, Marx argues that in his early novels Hawkes’s male characters seek to make order in a fragmented and chaotic world by subduing the world to their artistic, narrative, and apocalyptic visions. But in his more recent novels Hawkes has introduced women’s voices as a means of overturning the authority of the male-authored narratives. The result is the recognition that narratives do not make the world but must “negotiate their authority in the world with the stories of others.”
It would be interesting to see what Marx would do with Hawkes’s latest novel, An Irish Eye, narrated by a thirteen-year-old Irish foundling, Dervla O’Shannon, a.k.a. Thistle. In the style of a fairy tale Thistle describes life in Saint Martha’s Home for Foundling Girls, her eloping with World War I veteran Corporal Stack from the Old Soldiers’ Home across town, his injury and her virtual imprisonment in the manor where he is taken to recuperate, their escape, and her eventual return to the Home for Foundling Girls. But Thistle’s adventures are far from straightforward. The farther she roams from Saint Martha’s, the less stable are the countryside, her sexuality, and her sense of identity. The narrative itself becomes unstable as the story Thistle tells us competes with the letters she writes to the Foundling Mother back at Saint Martha’s and as it becomes less and less certain that she has ever left Saint Martha’s. Thistle tells us early on, “I shall never in my life be borne down by the mere truth of things.”
An Irish Eye strikes me as a bit slight, but Thistle is a captivating narrator and the story has the charm of a good, but twisted, children’s story. [Robert L. McLaughlin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction An Irish Eye by John Hawkes and Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse by Lesley Marx Robert L. McLaughlin John Hawkes. An Irish Eye. Viking, 1997. 159 pp. $22.95; Lesley Marx. Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1997. 244 pp. $39.50. John Hawkes is yet another contemporary American novelist who has unaccountably received relatively little scholarly attention. What a pleasure, then, to read Lesley Marx’s study of Hawkes’s career. In this smart, readable, and compelling book, Marx argues that in his early novels Hawkes’s male characters seek to make order in a fragmented and chaotic world by subduing the world to their artistic, narrative, and apocalyptic visions. But in his more recent novels Hawkes has introduced women’s voices as a means of overturning the authority of the male-authored narratives. The result is the recognition that narratives do not make the world but must “negotiate their authority in the world with the stories of others.” It would be interesting to see what Marx would do with Hawkes’s latest novel, An Irish Eye, narrated by a thirteen-year-old Irish foundling, Dervla O’Shannon, a.k.a. Thistle. In the style of a fairy tale Thistle describes life in Saint Martha’s Home for Foundling Girls, her eloping with World War I veteran Corporal Stack from the Old Soldiers’ Home across town, his injury and her virtual imprisonment in the manor where he is taken to recuperate, their escape, and her eventual return to the Home for Foundling Girls. But Thistle’s adventures are far from straightforward. The farther she roams from Saint Martha’s, the less stable are the countryside, her sexuality, and her sense of identity. The narrative itself becomes unstable as the story Thistle tells us competes with the letters she writes to the Foundling Mother back at Saint Martha’s and as it becomes less and less certain that she has ever left Saint Martha’s. Thistle tells us early on, “I shall never in my life be borne down by the mere truth of things.” An Irish Eye strikes me as a bit slight, but Thistle is a captivating narrator and the story has the charm of a good, but twisted, children’s story. [Robert L. McLaughlin]

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