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The Beetle Leg
La patte du scarabée. Mistletoe, «quelques centaines de maisons marron» et un terrible ennui à longueur d'année. Dix ans auparavant, au moment de la construction du barrage, Muige Lampson a été enterré vivant avec un tracteur à chenille sous une énorme coulée de boue. Depuis, désœuvrés, démunis, les uns et les autres rôdent, mal dans leur peau : Luke, le frère du mort, qui vit avec la veuve et une Indienne mandan ; Camper, revenu au pays, avec sa femme et son enfant mordu par un serpent ; Harry Bohn, un ancien ouvrier du barrage ; le Finnois, handicapé ; Cap Leech, vaguement rebouteux... Le shérif Wade surveille chacun, et tient à l'écart un groupe de motards minables. Le grand art de John Hawkes, c'est qu'il semble aiguiser ses mots sur la pierre du paysage, les apprêtant pour un massacre larvé. Les gestes, minutieusement décrits, s'enchaînent comme une chorégraphie qui sonne l'appel au malheur. Les protagonistes du drame, partis sur le lac de retenue maudit pour une partie de pêche, sont obsédés par cette sépulture de ferraille, abcès de tout l'endroit. Quand ils aborderont la rive, la digue intérieure qui les engourdissait aura cédé. Un flot de pus de racisme et de violence va les submerger. Les thèmes principaux de l'œuvre de Hawkes sont bien présents dans ce livre de 1951, noués par la même phrase : la littérature s'approvisionne aux fastes du malheur.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
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About the author
John Hawkes
109 books191 followersJohn Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
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October 15, 2023
It is a lawless country.
Reading John Hawke’s second novel, the purgatorial western The Beetle Leg, is like being a small child awake during the night, staring in horror at some formless dark beast of the imagination that lurks within the shadows of their room. The plot, notorious for its obtuseness and the stunning surrealism which furthers the difficulty of finding a handhold from which to cling, churns forward with growing dread and silent monstrosities that rivals even that of Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance. Like the formless beast in the corner, it is just that, the formlessness, which makes it so terrifying. To flip on the light and simply understand the features and shapes of which we fear shatters our dread. This is true as well in horror films where the most frightening moments are those when we know there is some terror just around the corner or behind the door, and to see the monster in full as opposed to just a quick flash of claw or demonic eye destroys the real horror that only the imagination can provide. In effect, Beetle Leg is so surreal, shifting and elusive because it is not made up of the actual forms and features of life, but of the shadows that they cast.
The Beetle Leg is very much akin to the works of Cormac McCarthy. This novel, published in 1951, is a precursor to McCarthy’s works, but the two fit together quite well, especially works such as McCarthy’s own Outer Dark. As in Outer Dark, Hawke’s creates a western set in a hellish wasteland of lawlessness. As with McCarthy, the world is a cruel place where the innocent are prey to the violence and venery of the damned, and natural causes are more frightening than any villain. It is often repeated that the only two deaths recorded in the Government City, made an official city due to the influx of workers settling there to work the dam project, are from natural causes. There is the incident of the ground breaking way and swallowing Mulge Lampson during a work accident and Hattie Lampson simply giving up the ghost in her old age. The majority of the characters in Hawke’s novel are rather impotent compared to the violence of the natural world. The biggest crimes committed are acts of lust in shallow ditches alongside the road as if they were lowly animals without the knowledge of personal dignity that would keep them from fornicating in public. Those locked in the jail are so docile that they endure being kicked in the ribs by the deputy without even moving to protect themselves, while snakes strike at the heels of children. Nature is described in vivid, figurative language of tight poetic scenery – some of the best lines are those describing the land, whereas the town and characters are given very little, if any, description beyond thin references to misshapen features. Like a proper western novel, the setting is as much a character as the people. If nature is a character, than it is surely the foe to the people, these people who are always struggling to keep it back by building up a dam, by cutting a city into it and using other forms of civilization to keep it back or controlled. ‘Where the scuff country met the broad back of the highway and little clumps of sand and weed were kept from spreading by the long raised shoulder of the road…’.
To try and pinpoint exact meanings to the swiftly flowing, black waters of plot is just as difficult as trying to merely follow where the flow is headed. Hawke’s toys with time, jumbling the order of several scenes and sashaying between past and present, as well as between two simultaneous threads occurring in different parts of town, to create an effect that time is not just something moving from A to B but something more all-encompassing. The scenes aren’t so much strung together in a cause and effect manner, one leading to the next through logical constructs, but more bleeding into one another the way our own dreams shift and mutate from one idea to the next. It isn’t the actual tangible ideas, made understandable in order to hold in our mind to turn over and examine, that matter in this book. It is the shadows of those tangible ideas that Hawke’s wants to immerse us into. To try and make sense of the ethereal scenes that pass through our minds, the reader must look into the emotions, tone and feelings that resonate from the prose instead of trying to comprehend the logic of the actual events. The scenes appear grounded in reality, but transcend the real through highly symbolic features and surreal sense of things being slightly amiss by wrapping each action and description up in abstract, metaphorical poetry. Simply actions as lighting a cigarette are elevated to poetic imagery by being described as ‘Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the skull glowed as he cupped his hands.’.
Hawke’s orchestrates a brilliant symphony of symbolism to build the apocalyptic tone of his novel, dipping deep into biblical allusions to gain a firm, icy grip on the souls of his readers. Almost every page is dripping with religious or demonic symbolism, from the snakes, images of fire, frequent talk of flood (a few pages after mentioning Mulge building an ark, the fishing boat bumps into the roof peak of a house that has all but been drowned by flood), and a scene when Luke feels ‘that slit eyes had opened, darkly over his shoulder’ as he is offered to trade his work boots for a pair of sandals that have crossed the globe (which, in a stretch, seems to be a Christ reference). Cap Leech is seemingly a satanic reference, coming out of his ‘nest of flames’ and with descriptions such as ‘Leech, the goat who sat in the hunched position of a man, shrugged, stroked the two long forks of hair at the end of his chin’. Leech also ‘possesses’ people, including the Sheriff, by doping them with ether and leading them to do his bidding. Leech also is described as missing one of his ribs, much like Adam from Genesis.
The book of Genesis seems to play a very large role in the novel. Take, for instance, the opening of chapter three, which details the creation of towns in the region:
Compare that to the opening to Genesis:
The comparisons don’t stop here as the whole of Beetle Leg—with its wasteland setting and its own abyss that claimed the life of Mulge Lampson—pushes toward a belief that this is more than just chance. Hawke’s also includes ‘Eve’s slimy pool, an unshielded dip of water in the waves of earth that…appeared to be covered with palm leaves, broad, clay-veined shadow’, which makes one wonder if this ‘little purgatory’ setting could be the eviction from Eden.
To simply use the religious context of the novel however, would be to cheapen it and pigeonhole it into some corner of deconstruction and literary criticism and, ultimately, the Beetle Leg would be able to wiggle free from the straps holding it to that operating table and present itself as something much greater. There are many pagan allusions as well, and a great deal of effort is put forth by the Sheriff in his insistence that the moon and astrological signs are what controls not only the crops but our own destinies as well. Hawke’s treats the religious and pagan symbols more as relics or trinkets which he scatters across the landscape that he illustrates for us. There are far more facets to this novel than can be addressed here, which is stunning for a novel of only 159 pages. The dam project is most likely an outlet of the New Deal projects, and the damnation of the characters could be a reflection of their societal conditions that is only metaphored by the damnation of their souls. This is clearly a novel that demands multiple readings, and I am excited for the discoveries I am sure to find on each repeat visit.
While being a difficult, demanding little novel, Hawke’s The Beetle Leg is a powerful display of surrealism and poetic potency. Those who enjoy the works of Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor (of whom Hawke and his wife were close friends with) and William Faulkner will find an exciting and refreshing blend of the three all poured into a postmodernist glass. This ideas of this book are ineffable, and can only, truly be done justice by simply reading this incredible novel. The effort is more than outweighed by the sheer beauty of the writing and careful handling of such vague, yet sprawling ideas that march forth through a procession of the damned towards a dramatic, apocalyptic climax.
4/5
Reading John Hawke’s second novel, the purgatorial western The Beetle Leg, is like being a small child awake during the night, staring in horror at some formless dark beast of the imagination that lurks within the shadows of their room. The plot, notorious for its obtuseness and the stunning surrealism which furthers the difficulty of finding a handhold from which to cling, churns forward with growing dread and silent monstrosities that rivals even that of Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance. Like the formless beast in the corner, it is just that, the formlessness, which makes it so terrifying. To flip on the light and simply understand the features and shapes of which we fear shatters our dread. This is true as well in horror films where the most frightening moments are those when we know there is some terror just around the corner or behind the door, and to see the monster in full as opposed to just a quick flash of claw or demonic eye destroys the real horror that only the imagination can provide. In effect, Beetle Leg is so surreal, shifting and elusive because it is not made up of the actual forms and features of life, but of the shadows that they cast.
The Beetle Leg is very much akin to the works of Cormac McCarthy. This novel, published in 1951, is a precursor to McCarthy’s works, but the two fit together quite well, especially works such as McCarthy’s own Outer Dark. As in Outer Dark, Hawke’s creates a western set in a hellish wasteland of lawlessness. As with McCarthy, the world is a cruel place where the innocent are prey to the violence and venery of the damned, and natural causes are more frightening than any villain. It is often repeated that the only two deaths recorded in the Government City, made an official city due to the influx of workers settling there to work the dam project, are from natural causes. There is the incident of the ground breaking way and swallowing Mulge Lampson during a work accident and Hattie Lampson simply giving up the ghost in her old age. The majority of the characters in Hawke’s novel are rather impotent compared to the violence of the natural world. The biggest crimes committed are acts of lust in shallow ditches alongside the road as if they were lowly animals without the knowledge of personal dignity that would keep them from fornicating in public. Those locked in the jail are so docile that they endure being kicked in the ribs by the deputy without even moving to protect themselves, while snakes strike at the heels of children. Nature is described in vivid, figurative language of tight poetic scenery – some of the best lines are those describing the land, whereas the town and characters are given very little, if any, description beyond thin references to misshapen features. Like a proper western novel, the setting is as much a character as the people. If nature is a character, than it is surely the foe to the people, these people who are always struggling to keep it back by building up a dam, by cutting a city into it and using other forms of civilization to keep it back or controlled. ‘Where the scuff country met the broad back of the highway and little clumps of sand and weed were kept from spreading by the long raised shoulder of the road…’.
To try and pinpoint exact meanings to the swiftly flowing, black waters of plot is just as difficult as trying to merely follow where the flow is headed. Hawke’s toys with time, jumbling the order of several scenes and sashaying between past and present, as well as between two simultaneous threads occurring in different parts of town, to create an effect that time is not just something moving from A to B but something more all-encompassing. The scenes aren’t so much strung together in a cause and effect manner, one leading to the next through logical constructs, but more bleeding into one another the way our own dreams shift and mutate from one idea to the next. It isn’t the actual tangible ideas, made understandable in order to hold in our mind to turn over and examine, that matter in this book. It is the shadows of those tangible ideas that Hawke’s wants to immerse us into. To try and make sense of the ethereal scenes that pass through our minds, the reader must look into the emotions, tone and feelings that resonate from the prose instead of trying to comprehend the logic of the actual events. The scenes appear grounded in reality, but transcend the real through highly symbolic features and surreal sense of things being slightly amiss by wrapping each action and description up in abstract, metaphorical poetry. Simply actions as lighting a cigarette are elevated to poetic imagery by being described as ‘Luke swallowed the match flame, the sides of the skull glowed as he cupped his hands.’.
Hawke’s orchestrates a brilliant symphony of symbolism to build the apocalyptic tone of his novel, dipping deep into biblical allusions to gain a firm, icy grip on the souls of his readers. Almost every page is dripping with religious or demonic symbolism, from the snakes, images of fire, frequent talk of flood (a few pages after mentioning Mulge building an ark, the fishing boat bumps into the roof peak of a house that has all but been drowned by flood), and a scene when Luke feels ‘that slit eyes had opened, darkly over his shoulder’ as he is offered to trade his work boots for a pair of sandals that have crossed the globe (which, in a stretch, seems to be a Christ reference). Cap Leech is seemingly a satanic reference, coming out of his ‘nest of flames’ and with descriptions such as ‘Leech, the goat who sat in the hunched position of a man, shrugged, stroked the two long forks of hair at the end of his chin’. Leech also ‘possesses’ people, including the Sheriff, by doping them with ether and leading them to do his bidding. Leech also is described as missing one of his ribs, much like Adam from Genesis.
The book of Genesis seems to play a very large role in the novel. Take, for instance, the opening of chapter three, which details the creation of towns in the region:
’in the beginning, before the sights were ever taken for Mistletoe, Government City, before the women and children arrived, when stray cows could stop wherever they pleased below the high ground to water, and the water in its turn could slug downstream to flood…’
Compare that to the opening to Genesis:
’In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.’
The comparisons don’t stop here as the whole of Beetle Leg—with its wasteland setting and its own abyss that claimed the life of Mulge Lampson—pushes toward a belief that this is more than just chance. Hawke’s also includes ‘Eve’s slimy pool, an unshielded dip of water in the waves of earth that…appeared to be covered with palm leaves, broad, clay-veined shadow’, which makes one wonder if this ‘little purgatory’ setting could be the eviction from Eden.
‘The first man had died in Eden, they pronounced him dead. And now, with brightening eye, he found himself sitting in the middle of the washed-out garden’s open hearth’.There is enough evidence to argue that the rockslide that claimed Mulge was indicative of the casting out from Eden. He did eat of the forbidden fruit, as he allegedly bedded the cook during his year of marriage, and for that was swallowed up by the earth. Or, perhaps, is this town truly representative of purgatory? The whole thread of the novels present occurs in one night, keeping everything bathed in a dark, shadowy gloom. This also could account for the strange handling of past and present, as time ceases to have meaning when faced with eternity. This is also in keeping with Bohn being ‘born from death’, pulled out and maimed by Leech’s tongs from the womb of his deceased mother. Perhaps this is why they sit around drinking and joking the one day Mulge will crawl up through the dirt and walk the earth again, like Jesus back from the dead, signaling that they can move on and into heaven. Mulge does border on being a Christ figure at times, his death being a symbol of the townspeople and the nightly pilgrimages Ma takes to the place of his death.
To simply use the religious context of the novel however, would be to cheapen it and pigeonhole it into some corner of deconstruction and literary criticism and, ultimately, the Beetle Leg would be able to wiggle free from the straps holding it to that operating table and present itself as something much greater. There are many pagan allusions as well, and a great deal of effort is put forth by the Sheriff in his insistence that the moon and astrological signs are what controls not only the crops but our own destinies as well. Hawke’s treats the religious and pagan symbols more as relics or trinkets which he scatters across the landscape that he illustrates for us. There are far more facets to this novel than can be addressed here, which is stunning for a novel of only 159 pages. The dam project is most likely an outlet of the New Deal projects, and the damnation of the characters could be a reflection of their societal conditions that is only metaphored by the damnation of their souls. This is clearly a novel that demands multiple readings, and I am excited for the discoveries I am sure to find on each repeat visit.
While being a difficult, demanding little novel, Hawke’s The Beetle Leg is a powerful display of surrealism and poetic potency. Those who enjoy the works of Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor (of whom Hawke and his wife were close friends with) and William Faulkner will find an exciting and refreshing blend of the three all poured into a postmodernist glass. This ideas of this book are ineffable, and can only, truly be done justice by simply reading this incredible novel. The effort is more than outweighed by the sheer beauty of the writing and careful handling of such vague, yet sprawling ideas that march forth through a procession of the damned towards a dramatic, apocalyptic climax.
4/5
December 7, 2016
It all happened once upon the time in the west…
There is a sheriff and there is a cowboy… There are anglers and there are hunters… But there is no romance.
It seems civilization has come to the west…
“It was only one of many eyesores, one hump in a chain of knolls, adding nothing but an artificial lake, obscuring nothing but two hoof beaten points on opposite banks where cattle used to swim across and land. Whatever went into the making or whatever had fallen short of the great pile, it hardened in the sun, swelled at the base and now grew suddenly higher if watched in the pink light of noon.”
There are anglers and there are hunters… And while the anglers could catch no fish the hunters have found a fine possibility to hunt some really big game…
“‘Switch on the lights.’ And through the whorls of milky undergrowth they saw the troop of Red Devils on little horned motorcycles.”
Probably The Beetle Leg is a little bit short of lucidity but on the other hand dark sarcasm occurs in abundance.
There is a sheriff and there is a cowboy… There are anglers and there are hunters… But there is no romance.
It seems civilization has come to the west…
“It was only one of many eyesores, one hump in a chain of knolls, adding nothing but an artificial lake, obscuring nothing but two hoof beaten points on opposite banks where cattle used to swim across and land. Whatever went into the making or whatever had fallen short of the great pile, it hardened in the sun, swelled at the base and now grew suddenly higher if watched in the pink light of noon.”
There are anglers and there are hunters… And while the anglers could catch no fish the hunters have found a fine possibility to hunt some really big game…
“‘Switch on the lights.’ And through the whorls of milky undergrowth they saw the troop of Red Devils on little horned motorcycles.”
Probably The Beetle Leg is a little bit short of lucidity but on the other hand dark sarcasm occurs in abundance.
Read
December 7, 2016I continue to be perplexed by the early novels of John Hawkes. His claims to have had no interest in conventional elements of the novel--character, plot, themes, etc--have never been born out by what he’s written; I don’t believe him. His books were introduced to me by John Barth, and nothing could be in starker contrast than the story-drunk Barth and the austerity of early Hawkes. But story, narrative, and plot, just like character, live rich lives in Hawkes, even if one needs to read far far below the text one is provided with. There is a richness here which haunts the reader even weeks later, an aesthetic experience which few aside from Herr Gass can champion as pure bliss. Some would designate it “atmosphere” but such would shed no light. There remains in my mind of experience something darker than light in these Hawkes novels; something much closer to experience which has always found itself less than fully illuminated.
November 25, 2012
It has been said Hawkes writes but doesn’t read. As in, he’s unreadable. Well, he is. I mean, he does. Theres a whole lot of nothing much going on here, but I’ve been weaned on de Chirico’s Hebdemeros, the quintessential book about nothing, so this isn’t going to send me on a wild goose chase so easily. Plus, the guy was only 23 when he wrote it: its very possible he had nothing much to say to begin with: how many of us do at that age?
But if he is thin on plot and action, butter won’t melt in his mouth. He has a way with words, a lulling cadence which carries mesmerizingly and draws you in.....not least because he dwells on the macabre, relishing the spin out of detail of Goyaesqye folks: the decrepit, rotting, porous, fungusly challenged denizens of Mistletoe, a settlement out in the West which no one from the outside seems to be able to actually find (witness Camper and Lou, who traverse backwards forwards almost futilely). Mistltoans have been lost in the West for so long they’re a breed of inbred: pale folk with ‘towhead’, whatever that is. Their ancestors mated with sheep in the ravines, the women are ‘whore-wounded’ and families share, but not like you know it: they seem to be in and out of each others knickers : its a veritable swingers paradise (e.g. Ma married Mulge who absconded with Thanga who....ah, well, get it?,), but all this is alluded to softly, softly: nothing is brash or crass in this sing-song bassuo continuo of foibles.
Hawkes is relaxed about the linearity of time, but it does seem to me, to all be happening on one particular night with various flashbacks, cut throughs and snap shot transitions. As to whats happening: beats me, but it does seem to anchor around the memory of one Mulge, buried in the beetle leg mountain: a shifting, moving hill which threatens to subsume Mistletoe. Mulge is a great non character: he is the Godot in this ‘surrealistic Western’: in a bizarre but unique scene, which actually takes up a whole chapter, the guy manages to get married without a single reference to himself: clever little technique.
I’m not sure how well Hawkes understands the fabric of the ‘wild west’, but even if he doesn’t, hes very good at shaping out complete weirdos and misfits. Warts and all.
A dreamy, wordy, eerie tale.
But if he is thin on plot and action, butter won’t melt in his mouth. He has a way with words, a lulling cadence which carries mesmerizingly and draws you in.....not least because he dwells on the macabre, relishing the spin out of detail of Goyaesqye folks: the decrepit, rotting, porous, fungusly challenged denizens of Mistletoe, a settlement out in the West which no one from the outside seems to be able to actually find (witness Camper and Lou, who traverse backwards forwards almost futilely). Mistltoans have been lost in the West for so long they’re a breed of inbred: pale folk with ‘towhead’, whatever that is. Their ancestors mated with sheep in the ravines, the women are ‘whore-wounded’ and families share, but not like you know it: they seem to be in and out of each others knickers : its a veritable swingers paradise (e.g. Ma married Mulge who absconded with Thanga who....ah, well, get it?,), but all this is alluded to softly, softly: nothing is brash or crass in this sing-song bassuo continuo of foibles.
Hawkes is relaxed about the linearity of time, but it does seem to me, to all be happening on one particular night with various flashbacks, cut throughs and snap shot transitions. As to whats happening: beats me, but it does seem to anchor around the memory of one Mulge, buried in the beetle leg mountain: a shifting, moving hill which threatens to subsume Mistletoe. Mulge is a great non character: he is the Godot in this ‘surrealistic Western’: in a bizarre but unique scene, which actually takes up a whole chapter, the guy manages to get married without a single reference to himself: clever little technique.
I’m not sure how well Hawkes understands the fabric of the ‘wild west’, but even if he doesn’t, hes very good at shaping out complete weirdos and misfits. Warts and all.
A dreamy, wordy, eerie tale.
May 10, 2013
Tried twice, found this unreadable. As friend AC said, there's something "deeply inauthentic" here. Read The Lime Twig instead. You'll be glad you did.
September 11, 2008
"I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."
This seems to me, to be the mission statement for most experimental fiction. The concept of the death of the novel always sounded a little too gimmicky for my taste. It's more appropriate for a contemporary writer to simply state that the novel as an artistic medium, has unlimited potential, and it can be manipulated in myriad ways. It's not the novel that is dead, it's the tired, formal restrictions of the novel that have been rendered obsolete by the stylistic audacity of certain writers. John Hawkes is definitely one of them.
I can't even remember exactly how I found out about the man. I vaguely recall him being grouped in with the likes of Joseph Mcelroy, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Coover. In other words, with every mention of Hawkes, the postmodern red flag always comes up, warning people that this is yet another one of those "difficult" writers. Not that the Beetle Leg isn't a difficult novel. In fact, it would probably be in my best interest to read it four more times before writing this, but here goes...
I mentioned how the beginning of the novel sounds like a direct influence on Mccarthy, in particular his book No Country for Old Men. The law plays a similar role here, but the sheriff in the Beetle Leg has less of a morally upright tone. However, he is just as beleaguered. For the most part, I still believe that Hawkes is an important influence on Mccarthy.
The setting is a sort of post-apocalyptic west (apparently this book is set in eastern Montana, that mostly sounds like conjecture, I saw no direct indication of that fact, but...it works). The sheriff is simply referred to throughout the book as the sheriff. The book begins with a passage from a book that he is reading aloud in the jail, he stops, puts the book down, and then begins, "It is a lawless country", indeed it is. This introduction to the town branches out into a number of fragmented narratives about a family called the Lampson's, a medicine man by the name of Cap Leech, a family traveling through the town (the son is bitten by a snake), the law, and a motorcycle gang called the Red Devils. Each character, or subgroup of characters seem to function metaphorically, all making different statements about this post World War II wasteland. They lament the dead, feel nothing short of complete apathy for the future, and merely deal with their present situations.
A great deal happens in the novel, but it seems to me that the most important detail to pay attention to is not the action that unfolds, but how the characters are dealing with it. There is a theme of restrained utilitarianism that prevails throughout. People do not have as much time to think about why they are doing something. What's more important is that it must be done in order to keep this strange cycle of existence going, and they all seem to be preoccupied adequately enough with that. Early in the novel, when a little girl becomes concerned with the presence of a strange man hanging out by the lake, the sheriff has a rather pragmatic reaction.
"Honey," I said, "I can't arrest that man." She didn't answer. If I did, the jail would be full of them, men who have come home on foot or men just walking aways from a ranch they never left and that I ain't happened to have seen before. We had too many in them days anyway. "He ain't hurt." I said. "He ain't drunk. I don't think he's got a gun. That's enough." But he was something to stare at for an hour or two."
This sort of indifference, or rational restraint sets the tone for the novel. Hawkes is definitely a talented prose stylist though. The one redeeming quality of the novel, especially for those who dislike floaty narratives, is his language. He's so mellifluous that it's surprising that this was only his second novel. It's difficult to decide on a particular passage that exemplifies his gracefulness, but here is a short, decent one.
"They fired. From the parapet of the truck a tinkling cloud of shot landed among the vandal herd, rock salt into the buttocks of cornered apple thieves. In the headlights and streaming of the muskets, on motorcycle, as its rider fled, turned to flame under the little seat, reared, contorted into a snake embrace, and fell writhing in fire. A honking set up from the handless horn as the rubber bulb shrank in the heat".
Nearly every paragraph in the book has this same consistent flow to it. It's a shame to think of how marginal he still is. Also, one last note about the narrative; there is one. It's digressive, yes, but it connects at enough points to form a whole. Hawkes's presentation is just extremely abstract. When I hear all of the standard complaints about experimental fiction and its lack of a plot or structure, I usually just chalk it up to laziness on the reader's behalf. Writers like Hawkes are not babysitters, he isn't going to hold your hand throughout the narrative, work is involved, and significant demands are placed upon the reader. I enjoyed it overall, but from what I've heard, which isn't much, Hawkes's later novels are much more polished.
As far as I have read, he draws the closest comparison to Mcelroy, but there are several stylistic similarities to Gaddis's narrative voice.
This seems to me, to be the mission statement for most experimental fiction. The concept of the death of the novel always sounded a little too gimmicky for my taste. It's more appropriate for a contemporary writer to simply state that the novel as an artistic medium, has unlimited potential, and it can be manipulated in myriad ways. It's not the novel that is dead, it's the tired, formal restrictions of the novel that have been rendered obsolete by the stylistic audacity of certain writers. John Hawkes is definitely one of them.
I can't even remember exactly how I found out about the man. I vaguely recall him being grouped in with the likes of Joseph Mcelroy, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Coover. In other words, with every mention of Hawkes, the postmodern red flag always comes up, warning people that this is yet another one of those "difficult" writers. Not that the Beetle Leg isn't a difficult novel. In fact, it would probably be in my best interest to read it four more times before writing this, but here goes...
I mentioned how the beginning of the novel sounds like a direct influence on Mccarthy, in particular his book No Country for Old Men. The law plays a similar role here, but the sheriff in the Beetle Leg has less of a morally upright tone. However, he is just as beleaguered. For the most part, I still believe that Hawkes is an important influence on Mccarthy.
The setting is a sort of post-apocalyptic west (apparently this book is set in eastern Montana, that mostly sounds like conjecture, I saw no direct indication of that fact, but...it works). The sheriff is simply referred to throughout the book as the sheriff. The book begins with a passage from a book that he is reading aloud in the jail, he stops, puts the book down, and then begins, "It is a lawless country", indeed it is. This introduction to the town branches out into a number of fragmented narratives about a family called the Lampson's, a medicine man by the name of Cap Leech, a family traveling through the town (the son is bitten by a snake), the law, and a motorcycle gang called the Red Devils. Each character, or subgroup of characters seem to function metaphorically, all making different statements about this post World War II wasteland. They lament the dead, feel nothing short of complete apathy for the future, and merely deal with their present situations.
A great deal happens in the novel, but it seems to me that the most important detail to pay attention to is not the action that unfolds, but how the characters are dealing with it. There is a theme of restrained utilitarianism that prevails throughout. People do not have as much time to think about why they are doing something. What's more important is that it must be done in order to keep this strange cycle of existence going, and they all seem to be preoccupied adequately enough with that. Early in the novel, when a little girl becomes concerned with the presence of a strange man hanging out by the lake, the sheriff has a rather pragmatic reaction.
"Honey," I said, "I can't arrest that man." She didn't answer. If I did, the jail would be full of them, men who have come home on foot or men just walking aways from a ranch they never left and that I ain't happened to have seen before. We had too many in them days anyway. "He ain't hurt." I said. "He ain't drunk. I don't think he's got a gun. That's enough." But he was something to stare at for an hour or two."
This sort of indifference, or rational restraint sets the tone for the novel. Hawkes is definitely a talented prose stylist though. The one redeeming quality of the novel, especially for those who dislike floaty narratives, is his language. He's so mellifluous that it's surprising that this was only his second novel. It's difficult to decide on a particular passage that exemplifies his gracefulness, but here is a short, decent one.
"They fired. From the parapet of the truck a tinkling cloud of shot landed among the vandal herd, rock salt into the buttocks of cornered apple thieves. In the headlights and streaming of the muskets, on motorcycle, as its rider fled, turned to flame under the little seat, reared, contorted into a snake embrace, and fell writhing in fire. A honking set up from the handless horn as the rubber bulb shrank in the heat".
Nearly every paragraph in the book has this same consistent flow to it. It's a shame to think of how marginal he still is. Also, one last note about the narrative; there is one. It's digressive, yes, but it connects at enough points to form a whole. Hawkes's presentation is just extremely abstract. When I hear all of the standard complaints about experimental fiction and its lack of a plot or structure, I usually just chalk it up to laziness on the reader's behalf. Writers like Hawkes are not babysitters, he isn't going to hold your hand throughout the narrative, work is involved, and significant demands are placed upon the reader. I enjoyed it overall, but from what I've heard, which isn't much, Hawkes's later novels are much more polished.
As far as I have read, he draws the closest comparison to Mcelroy, but there are several stylistic similarities to Gaddis's narrative voice.
October 27, 2017
If you tell me you understand all of it, I will tell you that you are absolutely full of shit to your face. Brilliant. A ghost.
January 11, 2016
The barest tracings of a story (a myth? a nightmare?) bubbling up through an indistinguishable murk of words and description. It's not incoherent, it's not nonsense, it just rigorously defies all effort to extract any overarching sense or purpose.
November 1, 2017
Look Who's Pulling Your Beetle Leg
This travesty of a post-modern minimalist novel (boldly published and promoted by James Laughlin's Nude Erections Books until "yesterday's obscure gibberish became today’s course requirement") is best left to the forty bearded shovellers banging their forty metal mugs on the planks of the makeshift timber table, sitting shoulder to shoulder, bumping in the darkness of their interminable empty nights. The employment of dredge and suction pump has done little toward changing the contour and imperfections of this yellow peakless sarcophagus of mud, in which fissures have appeared and deceptively closed, trapping wrestling mice and young lizards. Suddenly, silently but briskly, out of the murky solid, emerges a floating clot of cheerless recognition. Sometimes he dreamed that he could yawn.
This travesty of a post-modern minimalist novel (boldly published and promoted by James Laughlin's Nude Erections Books until "yesterday's obscure gibberish became today’s course requirement") is best left to the forty bearded shovellers banging their forty metal mugs on the planks of the makeshift timber table, sitting shoulder to shoulder, bumping in the darkness of their interminable empty nights. The employment of dredge and suction pump has done little toward changing the contour and imperfections of this yellow peakless sarcophagus of mud, in which fissures have appeared and deceptively closed, trapping wrestling mice and young lizards. Suddenly, silently but briskly, out of the murky solid, emerges a floating clot of cheerless recognition. Sometimes he dreamed that he could yawn.
August 3, 2024
Hawkes is a master of fragmentation; single sentences propel from character to land to wind to dust to the distance the dust traveled and what picked it up and what happens there... The same approach is taken to time, one of the novel's chief concerns and presented here as an indescribable state of now/then; the world is anachronistic, the narrative nonlinear, and there are Jurassic scenes of pre-human deserts; monumental periods rendered as single images, little posts in a constant desert. I didn't parse out the narrative on this first read, but I'm certain I understood.
October 18, 2018
Not sure what happened here—reading through many friends' glowing reviews of this one, it seems I have missed the magic somehow. Was it me? Was it the book? I guess those are pointless questions.
s.penkevich's review got the closest to making me re-evaluate my thoughts on this book, but ultimately, I just didn't see the depth or necessity to it that others did. Beyond the snake venom scene early on, there was just nothing here that made me want to linger and parse out. Hawkes's ability to use elision as a technique in the story telling is masterfully pulled off, however, the problem for me extends to a lack of depth beyond stylistic motifs. I think he's heir to Faulkner, but what he does that could be considered Faulknerian was just done so much more rigorously and interestingly by Faulkner that it's hard to appreciate where Hawkes brings novelty—which he does.
Others have suggested The Cannibal and The Lime Twig as superior Hawkes works. Maybe I'll revisit later down the line, but can't help feel a bit disappointed with this one.
s.penkevich's review got the closest to making me re-evaluate my thoughts on this book, but ultimately, I just didn't see the depth or necessity to it that others did. Beyond the snake venom scene early on, there was just nothing here that made me want to linger and parse out. Hawkes's ability to use elision as a technique in the story telling is masterfully pulled off, however, the problem for me extends to a lack of depth beyond stylistic motifs. I think he's heir to Faulkner, but what he does that could be considered Faulknerian was just done so much more rigorously and interestingly by Faulkner that it's hard to appreciate where Hawkes brings novelty—which he does.
Others have suggested The Cannibal and The Lime Twig as superior Hawkes works. Maybe I'll revisit later down the line, but can't help feel a bit disappointed with this one.
July 23, 2016
Nota bene: Do not read the following if you have no desire to discover what happens, though I make no guarantee to having accurately set forth what did—and, seeing as it makes not a lick of sense to those not partially subsumed within the ghost world, what the fuck do you care if it seeks to squeal that business anywho?
The sheriff narrates the opening chapter in a tongue thick with twanged weariness and the dust of life.
Luke Lampson has an older brother, Mulge—the man the sheriff spies frozen by the sludgy river in the opening narration?—who was killed in the renowned (locally) Great Slide from years back, a huge shifting of the sun-baked earth. Lampson, living with that dead brother's wife, a hard woman he calls Ma, and a silent, willful indian companion, the Mandan, sets out to find a man called Bohn (or something) in M. and then Claire. On the way to the first village he stops to suck the venom from the leg of a boy, the son of a man and wife—the Camper and Lou—touring through this particular inferno and of whom the former worked previously on the dam and was aware of the Great Slide.
Second chapter sees the Sheriff, an older man, and his (deputy?) Wade, who have some mysterious people—motorcycle gang The Red Devils, Indian half-breeds?—locked away in the jail. Wade is sent out to collect the travelling medicine man/dentist who extracts teeth and keeps ether on hand. Wade brings the MM to the jailhouse where the sheriff takes the ether, digs about in his parchments, and begins reading from where the opening narration began: It is a lawless country.
The small villages are amidst a harsh and unforgiving desert which is constantly referenced as claiming the lives of the unwary. However, Gov City and Mistletoe, it is further said, have had but two individuals—Mulge and Hattie Lampson—who have expired from natural causes over the past decade. It is apparently also a violent country, taking souls before their time; particularly those who have dared its vast, empty expanses in some peculiar manner of personal challenge/endurance contest/inward mystic sojourn and been utterly defeated, their wind-scoured, sun-devoured bones bleached and buried beneath the shifting sands and hardscrabble plains.
The Camper, Lou, and their tousle-headed lad find a hotel/resort in the midst of the empty plains, wherein the Camper disappears and Lou comes across Bohn and the Finn feasting on pie while the Cook, a giggly, trembling woman, rebuffs Lou's efforts to discover just what her husband's past link is to the hell-hiccuped place. Outside, workers from the dam sit with backs against the wall and soaking their aching, fungicidal feet in a violet liquid while the strains of a guitar sound.
Subsequently, the purple explodes like pineapples with imperial pretensions, the spray of hard tack and pliant mush making the entire readerly screen impermeable until, at the last, it blanches, scrubs itself unto ivory nothingness, and elevates the following to the queried heights:
The sheriff narrates the opening chapter in a tongue thick with twanged weariness and the dust of life.
Luke Lampson has an older brother, Mulge—the man the sheriff spies frozen by the sludgy river in the opening narration?—who was killed in the renowned (locally) Great Slide from years back, a huge shifting of the sun-baked earth. Lampson, living with that dead brother's wife, a hard woman he calls Ma, and a silent, willful indian companion, the Mandan, sets out to find a man called Bohn (or something) in M. and then Claire. On the way to the first village he stops to suck the venom from the leg of a boy, the son of a man and wife—the Camper and Lou—touring through this particular inferno and of whom the former worked previously on the dam and was aware of the Great Slide.
Second chapter sees the Sheriff, an older man, and his (deputy?) Wade, who have some mysterious people—motorcycle gang The Red Devils, Indian half-breeds?—locked away in the jail. Wade is sent out to collect the travelling medicine man/dentist who extracts teeth and keeps ether on hand. Wade brings the MM to the jailhouse where the sheriff takes the ether, digs about in his parchments, and begins reading from where the opening narration began: It is a lawless country.
The small villages are amidst a harsh and unforgiving desert which is constantly referenced as claiming the lives of the unwary. However, Gov City and Mistletoe, it is further said, have had but two individuals—Mulge and Hattie Lampson—who have expired from natural causes over the past decade. It is apparently also a violent country, taking souls before their time; particularly those who have dared its vast, empty expanses in some peculiar manner of personal challenge/endurance contest/inward mystic sojourn and been utterly defeated, their wind-scoured, sun-devoured bones bleached and buried beneath the shifting sands and hardscrabble plains.
The Camper, Lou, and their tousle-headed lad find a hotel/resort in the midst of the empty plains, wherein the Camper disappears and Lou comes across Bohn and the Finn feasting on pie while the Cook, a giggly, trembling woman, rebuffs Lou's efforts to discover just what her husband's past link is to the hell-hiccuped place. Outside, workers from the dam sit with backs against the wall and soaking their aching, fungicidal feet in a violet liquid while the strains of a guitar sound.
Subsequently, the purple explodes like pineapples with imperial pretensions, the spray of hard tack and pliant mush making the entire readerly screen impermeable until, at the last, it blanches, scrubs itself unto ivory nothingness, and elevates the following to the queried heights:
books-i-don-t-quite-seem-to-get
November 21, 2011I read a chunk of this and had no idea why... lots of descriptions about boots and tables or something... But what bothered me most is that this is an Ivy League professor trying to sound like he's a dirt cowboy in Montana -- just as, in the Lime Twig (which worked better, I thought), he was trying to sound like a working class Brit. There is something deeply inauthentic about this - though I suppose that some would call him a "master of style". Anyway -- to each his own.
November 16, 2007
An opaque, surreal parody of a western. Grotesque and confusing, will bring to mind Faulkner and Dante(and David Lynch).
October 17, 2017
A fractured novel set in a nightmarish American West, comprised of visions and disturbing set pieces. Amazing sentences that defy expectation at almost every phrase abound.
January 9, 2023
As close as any one has come to a legitimate Homeric American epic. A bible. Sentences that cut you in half. What does it all mean? I dunno. What does anything mean? AS beautiful and strange a book as Ive ever read. Also: evil motorcyclists! Or they could be out for a sunday cruise, looking for a place to get some pop (pap?). If you're trying to parse the book: 1) fuck off and 2) you're killing it! goddamnit, Vladimir enough with your fucking butterlies let em be! (Hmmmm, wonder if VN liked the Beatles? I say: no...or maybe secretly one day he was humming one of their songs and thought "what's become of me..." right before he slapped himself upside the head with a butterfly net. "O Vera! I'm losing my mind." This might all seem slap-dash and irreverent (isn't it?) but Nabokov came here in a Freudian (I bet he doesn't believe that...in re: Freud he doth protest too much....don't you think? You ougtta know) slip: Hawkes writes prose that rises to the heights of VN, Didion, anybody you'd care to name. Poetry. Awful beauty. Awful in every sense of the word.
July 27, 2012
this is my first Hawkes novel. i didn't think i would finish it. i kept saying, "i'm 40 pages/60 pages/halfway through this thing and i have no clue what it's even about!" now i've got 10 pages left in this book and i'm still not totally sure what's happening, but i still cannot put it down. the delivery is so alluring, the scenes are beautifully eerie and vivid, offering an impression of a scene with gritty detail on a few focal points. i suppose that's really how i recall most books anyway, not by the specific turns of a plot, but by the tone and the feel. whatever is happening, i'm hooked.
December 11, 2021
Take your time with this book. It's unlike anything you've ever read (thankfully). This is about ATMOSPHERE. An anxiety dream in 160 pages that you'll think about long after you finish.
December 1, 2023
Хорош со словом, но толку если это практически невозможно читать. Непонятно где история, чё вообще происходит? Кто герой эпизода? Зачем?
Не знаю, взять того же Беккета, там зачастую похожая ситуация, но там хотя бы прослеживается "смысл" и задумка автора. Что автоматически делает чтение интересней.
Не знаю, взять того же Беккета, там зачастую похожая ситуация, но там хотя бы прослеживается "смысл" и задумка автора. Что автоматически делает чтение интересней.
June 4, 2012
Before reading one of John Hawkes books, it is helpful to understand the author's intentions,
“I write out of a series of pictures that literally and actually do come to mind, but I’ve never seen them before. It is perfectly true that I don’t know what they mean, but I feel and know that they have meaning,” He says, and it is clear that the interest lies in verbal and psychological coherence, rather than any conventional plot that can be followed easily.
With the overlapping time-frames, and characters which morph into the events of setting, reading “The Beetle Leg” can be a meditation into the blurred actions that are occurring nebulously throughout the pages. That being said, Hawkes descriptive landscapes and enigmatic but raw behaviors are phenomenally achieved, in his greatly intelligent arrangement of words collected into paragraphs. This story was written in 1950 when Hawkes was spending the summer in Montana, as a tour guide on the Fort Peck Reservoir dam. An actual visit to these type of desolate places helps in understanding a spiritual side that this barren land offers.
The story takes place in a desert near a town surrounding a collapsed dam, which in the past has buried Luke Lampson's brother, Mulge, in its “Great slide.” Some of the characters include a child attacked by a poisonous snake on the side of the road, a spontaneously arriving pack of motorcyclists called the Red Devils, and a local sheriff who has a fancy for girls with short whirling skirts. Although the narrative sends you into tornado of meaning, everywhere amidst the authors blowing tumble-weeds of prose, lies a beautifully evocative tale.
June 21, 2020
Cubist western recommended for readers who felt the scariest part of Blood Meridian was the epilogue. Far from a fun or pleasant read, maybe even not a wholly satisfying one, but certainly one of the more viscerally frightening experiences I’ve had with a book in a while, painting a grim, timeless (in the sense that it lacks time) portrait of a land under the dangling sword of industry. Not sure I will be revisiting this. Extremely sure I will not forget it.
February 17, 2013
Not quite as accomplished as "Second Skin" or later novels (his next novel, The Lime Twig would be his breakout book), this seemed like a warm up for Cormac McCarthy's books of the West, particularly Blood Meridian which it echoes in tone and hyper-realism. The prose style employed here is bravura and exhilerating.
August 19, 2008
Thick, chewy stew of a novel poured into a small bowl. Plenty of gristle. Salty, salty but shy on spice. Nearly choked a time or two. Wouldn't recommend it as an airplane or commuter train read but an excellent choice for solitary confinement or for those that are trapped under rubble.
November 7, 2019
Me ha dejado completamente frío; más allá de que como escritor soy capaz de apreciar detalles de la construcción, arquitectura y lenguaje. Pero como lector no me ha dicho absolutamente nada.
November 13, 2022
A western where everyone just sort of wanders around dead landscapes lost in reveries
December 9, 2019
2 3/4 stars
March 25, 2018
strange western about dead water and one dam, about motobikes (once again) and one snake that bites a car, about one Sheriff who doesn`t like sex and one fetus instead of fish and about one corpse as a useless sacrifice.
April 22, 2010
Cap Leech is a good antecedent for McCarthy's Judge, except that things are even more discordant here.
June 25, 2020
Rare that a description of a landscape can bring one to tears:
"It was a sarcophagus of mud. It filled the gap between two lesser hills and prevented, by raising spit and shoals to sight, the flag flying traffic of river boats where a few had glittered in the night and crawled before. The dam caused to be beached the homemade leaking skiffs of ranchers whose land backed up to the mud colored misty fathoms trailing seaward. Where once bleak needles and spines had popped crookedly from the banks and a few flowers increasingly withered into the plain and disappeared, only the dust from the southward slope, swirling into the air, and a few animal bones and tin cans from a still deeper generation, survived. One small city of the plain lasted to welcome the tourist trade and issue reports on the depth of the almost foreign, dark pan of water. And yet, from the construction yard diggings, from the bits of wire in the sand and a beer bottle that might be found instead of a wreath, inscription, or shredded flag on the graded fresh slope of earth, from the drippings that seethed out of its dark insides and were measured, it seemed that the luck of gamblers, engineers and women had appeared, and from the bare mound indistinguishable from the bluffs at dusk, the highways, planned townsites and rock formations pushing west had stopped, fossilized and emerged."
Not so much a character-driven plot, more a setting-driven narrative, the plot being something resembling "the barest of dream-able forms," to quote Joseph McElroy.
The buried man is you.
"It was a sarcophagus of mud. It filled the gap between two lesser hills and prevented, by raising spit and shoals to sight, the flag flying traffic of river boats where a few had glittered in the night and crawled before. The dam caused to be beached the homemade leaking skiffs of ranchers whose land backed up to the mud colored misty fathoms trailing seaward. Where once bleak needles and spines had popped crookedly from the banks and a few flowers increasingly withered into the plain and disappeared, only the dust from the southward slope, swirling into the air, and a few animal bones and tin cans from a still deeper generation, survived. One small city of the plain lasted to welcome the tourist trade and issue reports on the depth of the almost foreign, dark pan of water. And yet, from the construction yard diggings, from the bits of wire in the sand and a beer bottle that might be found instead of a wreath, inscription, or shredded flag on the graded fresh slope of earth, from the drippings that seethed out of its dark insides and were measured, it seemed that the luck of gamblers, engineers and women had appeared, and from the bare mound indistinguishable from the bluffs at dusk, the highways, planned townsites and rock formations pushing west had stopped, fossilized and emerged."
Not so much a character-driven plot, more a setting-driven narrative, the plot being something resembling "the barest of dream-able forms," to quote Joseph McElroy.
The buried man is you.
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