Since the appearance of his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, the work of John Hawkes has proven him to be a writer whose technical control, poetic imagery and content demand critical recognition. His novels challenge the reader's imagination and force him to read them with the care necessary in reading most modern poetry. The variety of experimental techniques in dealing with time and space in his fiction, the use of fantasy and dream and the pervasive, naturalistic theme of the determinacy of history and myth over men's lives suggest the influence in his work of naturalism and symbolism. In this he belongs to a tradition which combines the Gothic fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and Poe with the compressed symbolism and ironic view of Crane, Bierce and, on occasion, Hemingway. In Hawkes's particular view of the novel and the function of the novelist, the imagination dominates the fact…. Because of his "detached" approach, Hawkes achieves sympathy without sentimentality. His credo might be shared by Djuna Barnes, Nathanael West, Bernard Malamud, James Purdy, and Flannery O'Connor among contemporary writers…. Where Hawkes excels over the tried-and-true "realistic" writers is in the uses of imagination and the power to excite that faculty in the reader. (pp. 345-46)
[His technique of reworking myths to convey his perspective of modern man] is most evident in The Beetle Leg (1951), a novel set in the American desert near the site of a dam. The dry season and the figure of the fisherman at the dam are not unfamiliar images from T. S. Eliot's Waste Land. Beyond these, Hawkes's concept of the buried Christ-Osiris in the slowly sliding wall of the dam ("the sarcophagus of mud") is a prime example of his mythopoesis. The imperceptible movement of the retaining wall becomes the inevitable force and movement of the universe and the small absurd heroes, whether their activity is directed towards the wall or the fields, below, cannot check the cosmic flux. (pp. 346-47)
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