His lion eyes

by Tim Pfaff

There’s such sinewy, feral strength in the voice that powers Henry Hoke’s new novel, “Open Throat” (MCA/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) that the voices both promoting and commenting on it to date have not had to deploy the prevailing nostrum of the day, “genrebending.” The novel is sui generis, literally in a class of its own.

The unnamed firstperson narrator is a queer mountain lion living under the Hollywood sign in the hills of what they call “ellay.” This is no cuddly kitty, but our canny cougar is an engaging storyteller the reader is inclined to believe, if not rescue.

“Open Throat” is hardly the first work of fiction to view the human world through the eyes of an animal, nor the first to imply that animals are really better people than people. The cougar’s observations of human behavior are at once scathing and dismissive, but in no time the reader is solidly on the cougar’s side.

Pride of lion

What makes the novel work is that it hews more to the style of a fable than the strangely more limiting parable. The reader will, largely, relate to the animal’s horror at what man has made of his shared physical environment, but the harshest assessments are typically presented with a disarming charm.

Hoke leads with a sentence many another writer would die for.

“I’ve never eaten a person but today I might.”

The forces that drive the cat’s passage through the urban hellscape –insatiable hunger and unquenchable thirst– could hardly be more basic. Regarding the world with equal parts bafflement and harsh judgment, the beast experiences drought-stricken “ellay” as both predator and prey. Even their summary judgments are disarmingly simple. “I try to understand people but they make it hard.”

Hoke does not overwork his creature’s queerness. Even the most assiduous book-banners might have to have the sexuality issues pointed out to them. There are clear indications that the cougar is anatomically male; they have “dangling parts” like those of the man who pisses on them, initially unaware of the danger afoot. There’s an erotic component in sharing a meal with an accommodating fellow predator. The violence the cat sees in the world echoes the life-threatening violence of their own father.

The cat’s essential queerness allows them to regard examples of the same-sex rites they witness with a kind of knowing wonder. Fascination with two boys walking hand in hand comes with an unmistakable warmth. There’s something more sinister in the cat’s account of two men going into a cave together, having sex (perfectly told with the insights of a quadruped, which gets around the inherent traps of sex writing), and then leaving the cave separately. Outdoorsy gay men will understand.