
Mysterious Skin
DOROTHY B. HUGHES’S last novel, The Expendable Man (1963), seems at first to be the old story of the man with a guilty past, but it’s much more original and inventive than that. In one sense, it is an exercise in pure form, exploring the nouveau roman idea that what isn’t stated (the color of someone’s skin, for instance) doesn’t exist. It opens with a landscape: “Across the tracks there was a different world. The long and lonely country was the color of sand.” In some ways, this novel is all about landscape: who is allowed to inhabit it freely and who is not. A young doctor, driving from LA