The Hawk Is Dying

In Naked in Garden Hills, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, and Car, Harry Crews, with his superb novelistic gifts, wrote of the demonic and the bizarre, in what The New York Times Book Review has called a “Hieronymus Bosch landscape.” Now, in The Hawk Is Dying, he moves to a different landscape, populated by men and women who are above all ordinary, whose battle against the “nothing period” of being alive makes them at once recognizable, familiar, and real.

At the heart of the book is George Gattling of Gainesville, Florida, fighting the boredom, the excruciating unimportance, of his existence. He has a successful custom-seatcover business, a $60,000 ranch-style home, a family of sorts—his sister Precious, who lies in bed reading aloud the “Ask Them Yourselves” questions in Family Weekly, her son Fred, who every now and then utters one word like “cork” or “toe” and is definitely either retarded or a genius; and Betty, a psychology major whose actual study is copulation.

And he has his hawk.

The hawk is the mirror for all of George’s held-in passions. It goes with him everywhere—to breakfast, to Betty’s bed, to a funeral home at four in the morning. When the hawk at last springs from his arm, prompted by the thought of freedom, swooping for its prey, life will become exciting! animated! tumultuous! . . . and George will have finally escaped the expected and the everyday entering into the immediate, where the senses are quickly awakened and emotions are unrestrained.

In a story filled with scenes that are funny and touching and wonderfully bawdy, Harry Crews has captured the human spirit searching for that Supreme Something which will banish all “dead ends” forever, which will promise—virtually guarantee— the rapturous beginning of Life.