A queer cougar in Hollywood
By Simon Demetriou
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
It’s not a new thought to any pet owner to wonder what the animals surrounding us would have to say about us if only they could speak. Well, in Henry Hoke’s moving fable for grown-ups, we get to read what a queer cougar living in the Hollywood Hills has to say about the humans in whose world he unfortunately has to live.
What emerges is a tender, witty, and ultimately harrowing image of a being trying to get to grips with what’s around him. Running through these attempts is the figure of a man who at the book’s opening is whipping another man’s testicles as the prone flagellant’s partner films their homemade bondage porn. The whip-bearer is the emblem of how man’s excesses make him both absurd and casually, catastrophically harmful.
This first encounter is comic, but set against the isolated lion’s inability to find companionship, let alone sexual gratification, it becomes another way in which mankind is utterly divorced from the basic needs of the natural world.
Later, the man with the whip indulges in an act of unthinking prejudice that has life-altering consequences for the lion and all the other inhabitants of the park beneath the Hollywood sign. He is also the prompt and site of the lion’s final, tragic, glorious heroism.
Between these moments, Hoke intersperses tragi-comic reflections on the snippets of conversation picked up as the lion eavesdrops on hikers who are forever talking about their therapists (‘I pay her two hundred a session just to talk shit about my parents’). The lion decides, ‘a therapist is something I want / I don’t know if I feel good or bad’, and as we learn about his past, we are reminded of how petty so many human mommy-and-daddy-issues are.
In effect, the reader becomes the lion’s therapist, but just as the lion is incapable of really expressing himself to a person, so we can never respond with the words of support we wish we could give him. In this way, the lion is everyone who feels out of the loop, who yearns for connection, whose desires and – often – needs go unmet by a world that doesn’t know of or doesn’t want to acknowledge their existence.
My only complaint about this book, is that Hoke arbitrarily decides that despite all the words the lion can skilfully use and correctly spell, he can only phonetically grasp ‘ellay’ and ‘diznee’ (LA and Disney – obviously). This is pointless and self-sabotaging, and it annoys me in a book that is otherwise so meaningful and beautifully composed, in which Hoke skilfully manages to bring out our own vulnerabilities while exposing our worst insensitivities, self-indulgences, and cruelties.
Ignore my pedantry. Enjoy the book.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.