Second Skin Signed First Edition Reference
Second Skin is John Hawkes’s most accessible novel and the one most frequently recommended as an entry point to his challenging body of work. Published by New Directions in 1964, it is narrated by Skipper, a bumbling, self-deceiving former naval officer who recounts his life story — or rather, his carefully edited version of his life story — from a tropical island where he has retreated after a series of disasters involving his daughter’s suicide, his own sexual humiliations, and a pattern of violence that he both attracts and refuses to acknowledge.
The Novel
Skipper’s unreliability as a narrator is the novel’s central device. He presents himself as a benign, long-suffering figure — the victim of circumstances and other people’s cruelty — but the details he inadvertently reveals suggest a more complex and disturbing reality. The tropical island setting (the second skin of the title) provides a paradise that may or may not be real, and the reader is never certain whether Skipper has genuinely escaped his past or merely constructed a more elaborate delusion.
The novel is both funny and disturbing — Hawkes’s darkest themes (violence, sexual degradation, self-deception) are delivered through a narrator so oblivious to his own role in his disasters that the effect is simultaneously comic and tragic. It is the Hawkes novel most likely to appeal to readers who enjoy Nabokov’s similarly unreliable narrators.
First Edition Identification
Publisher: New Directions, New York Publication date: 1964
Signed Copy Market Values
- Signed first edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Inscribed copies: $300–$700
- Unsigned first edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
Second Skin is a strong value in the Hawkes collecting universe — a major novel by an important writer, available at accessible prices. For collectors who want a single Hawkes title, the choice between The Lime Twig and Second Skin is a matter of taste: the former is darker and more radical, the latter more humane and more readable.