The Lime Twig is a classic short novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 or novella

Novella

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

 by experimental American writer John Hawkes.

Plot

This highly elliptical novel, set in England after World War II, deals with a sedate, bored lower-class couple -- Michael and Margaret Banks -- who are lured into fronting a racehorse scheme. Michael Banks is befriended by William Hencher, a well-meaning but lost soul who fell into association with a ruthless gang during the war. After his mother's death, Hencher wants to repay the Bankses for their allowing him to rent a room in their home, where he lived with his mother twenty years prior. Knowing Michael likes horses, Hencher invites him to the heist of the racehorse Rock Castle -- which goes awry, leading to Hencher's death. The gang members then keep Michael under wraps. Realizing that Margaret is becoming suspicious of Michael's absence, they force Michael to call and tell her to meet him at a party. In order to ensure that Michael will front as the owner of the stolen stallion, they kidnap Margaret while distracting Michael with two women, both sexual predators. The heavy of the gang, Thick, beats Margaret mercilessly with a truncheon after she attempts to escape; then, Larry, the seemingly invincible kingpin of the gang who orchestrates the novel's events, slashes and rapes her. Meanwhile, in a brutally ironic contrast, Michael finds delirious pleasure in a femme fatale

Femme fatale

A femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art...

, Sybilline, the mistress of Larry -- and two other women, as well. Having been badly beaten in a street fight with a constable, Michael attempts to redeem himself from both criminal activity and infidelity by thwarting the race, which has been set up in order to allow Larry to retire to America in comfort.

Plot, though, is decidedly subordinate in Hawkes' fiction to intense imagery and a nightmarish, hallucinatory atmosphere. Many details of the plot can only be inferred, and many narrative questions cannot easily be answered. The narrative parodies detective thrillers, particularly through the final presentation of two baffled detectives in bowler hats who, having discovered Hencher's corpse during a heavy rain, set out "separately on vacant streets to uncover the particulars of this crime." In some sense, these figures may be taken as representatives of the reader, who is left to make coherent sense out of the novel's fragments. Some readers have found the novel's events highly disturbing, but the ultimate meaning and value of the work are irreducible to incident; instead, they inhere in the vividly impressionistic style through which these sordid events are both presented and transfigured.

Style and Structure

The work is told in a framed narrative, with the commentary of the sports writer Sidney Slyter prefacing each chapter (at the request of Hawkes' publisher New Directions, who feared that the novella would be too confusing otherwise). Hencher narrates the first chapter, which concerns his recollections of life with his mother during World War II. The other chapters are all presented in a third-person limited style with a focus on the banal inner lives of Michael and Margaret Banks. The style is one of broken, dreamlike sequences, which suspend time in a quintessentially postmodern fashion. The novella's accumulation of events acts as wish fulfillment run amok for Michael and Margaret, both of whom become helplessly entrapped in fantasies that turn into nightmares. Hawkes underscores the theme of entrapment imagistically, with fleeting references to a sparrow attacked by a hive of bees, a wasp trapped between panes of glass, and so on. The title of the novel itself refers to the old practice of catching birds by spreading lime on a twig, the master trope of the narrative.

Influential American literary critic Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was a Jewish-American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working...

 contributed a preface, arguing for Hawkes' greatness: "For the sake of art and the truth, [Hawkes] dissolves the rational universe which we are driven, for the sake of sanity and peace, to manufacture out of the chaos of memory, impression, reflex and fantasy." Southern writer Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries...

(a friend of Hawkes) praised the novella as well, commenting in a letter that "You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream. It seems to be something that is happening to you, that you want to escape from but can't."

Secondary Literature

• Robert I. Edenbaum, "John Hawkes: The Lime Twig and Other Tenuous Horrors." The Massachusetts Review Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer, 1966), pp. 462-475.