 1st edition cover | |
| Author | John Hawkes |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Postmodern literature |
| Publisher | New Directions Publishing |
Publication date | 1964 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 210 pp |
| Preceded by | The Lime Twig |
| Followed by | The Innocent Party |
 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(January 2022) |
Second Skin is a 1964 novel by John Hawkes.
The story is told by a 1st-person narrator, a fifty-nine-year-old ex-naval lieutenant whose name is Edward, though other characters usually call him Skipper or Papa Cue Ball (due to his baldness). Though the tone of the novel strives to be comic and optimistic, the narrator's life is beset by a series of tragic events: his father (a mortician), his wife, and his daughter Cassandra commit suicide; his son-in-law Fernandez is killed after he has left Cassandra to live with his gay lover; Skipper is beaten up and perhaps raped during a mutiny on board of U.S.S. Starfish, the ship he commands in W.W.II; he is harassed by a small clan of shady fishermen on the "black island" in north-Atlantic where he settles after leaving the US Navy. The narrator eventually finds shelter in a tropical island with his black mess boy, Sonny, and his lover Catalina Kate, though it is not clear if the scenes on the island, where Skipper works as an artificial inseminator, are real or simply imagined.
The novel is told in a non-linear fashion through a series of flashbacks. It is then at first difficult for the reader to understand the reasons of some weird episodes, such as the one which takes place in the second chapter, when Skipper, goaded by Cassandra, has the name of his son-in-law Fernandez tattooed on his chest in green ink. We subsequently discover that Fernandez has left Cassandra because their marriage was no more than a masquerade, devised to hide Skipper's incestuous relation to his daughter (which may also explain his wife Gertrude's suicide).
The chapters of the novel alternate moments in the present of the tropical island with flashbacks that show readers moments of the past in a jumbled fashion.
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