Adventures In The Alaskan Skin Trade

By John Hawkes. ISBN 0-671-47304-2. Jack Deauville was a stalwart but im- practical adventurer, a "meddler'' im prisoned in his own demanding, un comprehending manhood. A New Englander by birth, he headed north to Alaska after the stock-market crash. Jack's story is narrated by his daughter Sunny, who runs the Alaska-Yukon Gamelands brothel and who is haunted by nightmares of her domineering fa ther and his mysterious death. Hawkes's new novel is less compelling as a study of a father-daughter relation ship than as a collection of Alaskan tall tales, some of them very good indeed. A far livelier and more amiable work than his mock-pornographic Virginie, Adventures may broaden Hawkes's readership considerably. In Innocence in Extremis , Jack is 12 when his philandering father returns to France with his menage to visit his own father, a "provincial aristocrat'' and an even greater philanderer. This novella describes the sexual crosscurrents at : the Old Gentleman's chateau, Jack's introduction to the world of passion, and his puritanical mother's ambivalent reaction. This is an overly schematic footnote to Jack's Alaskan adventures, and most likely to appeal to those famil iar with Hawkes's earlier, somewhat cold-blooded fiction.