John Hawkes, The Lime Twig

Rita Ferrari (Independent Scholar - North America)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1961

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

John Hawkes's novel The Lime Twig (1961) opens with the narration of William Hencher, a lonely, overweight man who for fifteen years moved with his mother from lodging to lodging in a fictitious section of London called “Dreary Station”. Hencher describes the suffocatingly intimate details of life with his mother, filling his narrative with visceral images of improvised domestic arrangements and of the acute fear of the fire bombing of the city during World War II. It was a time that left Hencher with “plenty of soot and scum the memory could not let go of”. In the post-war years and a decade after the death of his mother, Hencher finds lodging once more in the house where she died. The house is now owned by Michael Banks …

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2198 words

Citation: Ferrari, Rita. "The Lime Twig". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2000 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=343, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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