Konrad Vost, hero of "The Passion Artist," continues Hawkes's fictional interest in relations between the sexes. Vost's artistry in passion is his ability to walk a thin line between desire and frustration. His erotic passivity and anger are counterweights, each checking the pull of the other from giving in or letting go. (p. 7)

Hawkes seems fascinated by ambivalence as a deadlock between passivity and violence. When Vost permits a young prostitute to beckon him out of his six-year sexual fast, his rage flows with his orgasm. When female prisoners revolt against their guards, he joins the guards, beating the most fragile women the most violently. These events suggest large meanings: Men seem drawn to women because they hold the promise of pleasure and release but are repelled because women make them lose their self-control. When the anger of women is not contained, it erupts in vengeance on men. If male fury is not checked by male passivity, it becomes a murderous force. But Hawkes raises such large issues only to drop them in a series of pornographic, sadomasochistic scenes in which Vost is victimizer and victimized.

Hawkes throws away the force of his vision in episodes that, though striking, go nowhere. Vost seems merely a puppet in the sideshow of a master of special effects. Hawkes is too much the detached connoisseur of disaster; the facile perversions of "The Passion Artist" inspire the dubious admiration one might feel for colorful cruelties described by a supreme stylist. At his best, Hawkes can do much more. He can persuade you that suffering signifies that there is something necessary even in terrible events and attachments. Lacking the haunting fatalism that gives moral and psychological depth to his earlier novels. "The Passion Artist" seems a detour to nihilism.

Hawkes occupies a central place in the fiction of the problematic and troubled. With Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Joseph McElroy he remains among the most innovative and original American writers. In "The Passion Artist" his virtuosity leads to superficiality. He caresses the symptoms of heterosexual disorder but evades the disease, he stages a fiery show but provides no illumination. (pp. 7, 36)

Leslie Fiedler once described John Hawkes very accurately as "a Gothic writer … one who makes terror rather than love the center of his work." Paradoxically, it is love—or at least sexuality, the core of love—that lies at the heart of The Passion Artist, though terror in all its forms delineates the nature of that beast. In fact, for the protagonist of this disturbing novel (as well as for its author, one suspects), the two constitute the yin and yang of life. (p. 106)

Hawkes's method in this tale is to present incidents as they occur internally, juxtaposing dreams and actuality, metaphor and fact, in such a way that they are indistinguishable. This is, of course, a powerful device if carefully controlled; but here Hawkes seems to have been carried away by the immensity of his imagination. Passages of brilliant writing are followed by scenes whose turgid brutality seems to serve no purpose, not even that of shock value. Unhappily, The Passion Artist never coheres into a consistent whole, despite the potency of its author's vision. (p. 107)