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.

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).

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.

Southern writer Flannery O'Connor (a friend of Hawkes) praised the novel as well, commenting in a letter that "You suffer The Lime Twig like a dream.