The Blood Oranges [1971] - John Hawkes

"[H]as it ever occurred to you that your life is a coma? That you live your entire life in a coma? Sometimes I cannot help but think that you never entirely emerge from your flickering cave. You must know things the rest of us can never know, except by inference. But I do not envy you the darkness and suffering of your coma, my friend."

It's impossible for me to think of fiction without a moral center. My work is an effort to expose the worst in us all, to cause us to face up to the enormities of our terrible potential for betrayal, disgrace and criminal behavior." - John Hawkes

The death of American author John Hawkes in May 1998 barely caused a ripple throughout the literary world (it didn't help any that Hawkes died the day after the "Chairman of the Board" Frank Sinatra took his final voyage to the great beyond). It's true that Hawkes wasn't the most accessible author in the world. His works have been variously regarded as "avant-garde," "experimental," "meticulously crafted," "postmodern" and "demanding." He never manged to join John Grisham, Jimmy Buffett and Jesse Ventura on the bestseller list with his novels such as The Cannibal, The Blood Oranges, Travesty and Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. Hawkes once revealed in an interview that he began to write fiction "on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme . . ."