Going out with pride

Modern-day perils

There’s tenderness in the cat’s protection of a group of otherwise homeless tent dwellers – “my people”–whose fragile existence is imperiled by a man-made fire. At the other extreme of the critter’s emotional arc is an obsession with a man assaulting a couple with a whip. The telling detail Hoke employs is the cat’s obsession with the bulging vein in the man’s neck, which infiltrates the whole novel and sets the stage for one last kill. The man with the thick neck is reduced in the final pages to the Open Throat of the title.

Much of what the lion sees reflects concerns of their human counterparts. At a time when smoke from the north looks to imperil all of the continental U.S., Hoke’s depictions of the real fires that menace the region are at the least disconcerting. It’s distressing when the lion quips “fire is the only future.”

A reader initially puzzled by the lion’s reference to the “long death” is struck by the eventual realization that it identifies the freeway. Similarly, there’s “green paper” for money (both what it can and cannot do for you).

When the lion overhears hikers speaking of scarcity, what he hears instead is “scare city.” “There’s something wrong with my ears,” they say. “I can’t shut them like I can my eyes.”

Is the apostrophe punctuation?

The novel unfolds in a fast-paced series of short chapters composed of sentences that seldom run to more than five lines. There is no capitalization, and the only punctuation mark used is the necessary apostrophe. Amazingly, that never becomes wearying. What the style permits is the occasionally blazing line: “The burn is behind me but the smoke is everywhere.”

The “wall of metal poles” points to the Los Angeles Zoo.

“I expect the animals I smell to be impaled here too…. alive this time not fake alive and dripping blood that I can lick and lick from the metal.”

The cumulative power of Hoke’s short sentence fragments makes for “paragraphs” as disturbing as these:

“I’ll show you a predator beyond a murky green pond that even I won’t drink from my nostrils catch an irresistible scent small and sick and afraid three of my favorite flavors.”

When the lion attracts the attention of an innocent young girl, she says “good morning heckit,” and they puzzle over the name she has given them.

“heckit

I’ll take it

I can’t tell her my real one my mother gave it to me when she first saw me lick blood off my lips it’s not made of noises a person can make.”

What makes the novel such a compelling read is precisely Hoke’s uncanny ability to conjure noises no person can make with customary words magically recombined.

“Open Throat” is Hoke’s first novel published by a major publisher, but it’s his fifth book. This being Pride Month and all, it seems only right to tip the hat to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Its MCD division has led to the publication of several books, like this one by queer authors with singular visions that would otherwise not seen the light of day.t

‘Open Throat’ by Henry Hoke. MCA/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 161 pp., $25, www.fsgbooks.com

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