Staff Pick: Michelle Mounts

In the midst of my own personal 70s-era-fiction revival, I have come across the riveting and terrifying Travesty by John Hawkes. Imagine being trapped for 128 pages inside a car racing at top speed down a country road toward a stone wall, trapped inside the monologue of the driver, Papa, who has decided to take his best friend, Henri, and his 25-year-old daughter, Chantal, on a ride toward explosive death. Why would he do such a thing? The answer you arrive upon might say more about who you are than you’re comfortable with...

Papa is the ultimate antihero, the pathopsychological monsterman in the driver’s seat. Hawkes was in WWII, and after wandering in the debris of a surreal nightmare landscape in which you can’t tell why people are doing what they are doing, he became obsessed with the rebel hero, the logical lunatic, the murderer as genius (“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style, ” writes Nabokov), in the face of mundane bourgeois life. Your discomfort as a reader is his triumph.

This wicked little volume reminds me of Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart and Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. Papa seems to be saying, “I’m ill, I don’t want to be cured, I’m loving my despair, I’m adoring my suffering---and suffering, after all, is consciousness. ”

Bio: Michelle Mounts is Guernica’s literary editor.