Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is narrated by a queer mountain lion who lives beneath the Hollywood sign in LA. If the narrative sounds strange, the unpunctuated prose – sheared of capital letters and full stops but made surprisingly readable by frequent line breaks – is no less so.
Despite its zany premise, this is a surprisingly melancholy book, an elegiac lament for a world slowly being strangled by human rapacity.
Our nameless lion arrives in LA as a juvenile, driven from a land where deer are plentiful and rivers still run, by a father who can see his fully-grown offspring only as a threat. By day, our lion lays low in their thicket, listening to the conversations of passing hikers about everything from New York therapists to the grotesque allure of Donald Trump. By night, they creep into a homeless camp in search of water, developing a fondness for the unknowing inhabitants.
This stealthy observer is witness to all the perversity and depravity human beings are capable of. Open Throat is concerned with all-too-human questions, about how societies can tolerate so much abundance to coexist with so much destitution, as much as with the destruction of the natural world.
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The book’s outlandish premise does not always come off. The overriding silliness of a sequence about a teenage girl who adopts our lion, in rebellion against her father and his young new wife, robs the culminating confrontation of all real drama.
These flatter moments are made up for by some remarkable imaginative feats. A particular highlight is a scene that cuts between our lion watching two men having sex in a cave and memories of sharing food with another lion, stirring erotic fantasies and wistful dreams of what might have been if the other lion hadn’t been killed crossing a road.
This is the first of Hoke’s books to receive significant international notice. Though its politics might be as predictable as the rash of recent, conventional novels about attractive city dwellers in their teens and 20s struggling with their mental health, class identity, and queer desire, Open Throat, for all its inconsistencies, is a more beguiling and memorable work – a curio well worth the few short hours it takes to read.
