Just Like a Person
Henry Hoke, Open Throat
Picador, 176pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781035007752
reviewed by Tia Glista
In 2013, a National Geographic photographer named Steve Winter captured a now-famous image of a Los Angeles icon: lit by the twinkle of the city below, the mountain lion dubbed P-22 slinks past the Hollywood sign, his muscles surging and amber eyes trained on the path ahead. P-22, also known as the Hollywood Cat, is said to have lived in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for some ten years before being euthanised by scientists in late 2022. When he was officially laid to rest earlier this year in the Santa Monica Mountains from which he hailed, P-22 was grieved by members of the Chumash, Tataviam and Gabrielino-Tongva peoples, and memorialised with songs, prayers, and a sage ceremony. He was also the ‘poster cat’ for a groundbreaking wildlife crossing, begun last spring, that traverses the busy 101 freeway to help prevent displaced and migratory animals from being killed in traffic.
More recently, P-22 has been considered through fiction. The animal is at the heart of Henry Hoke’s third novel, Open Throat, which the writer dedicates to the late-cougar, writing in the Acknowledgements that he ‘walks beside me in dreams’. Yet in this new book, Hoke does not merely walk with P-22, but speaks for his kind through a first-person, fictionalised account of a lonely, queer mountain lion driven from their habitat. Across fiction, nonfiction, and other projects that combine the two, Hoke has established a pattern of focusing intensely on his chosen subject until they are imbued with a sense of the hyperreal — for instance, in his 2022 memoir, he examined queer boyhood in the American South through the cultural life of stickers. With Open Throat he streamlines this gaze even more tightly, crafting a compact drink of a novel: it is a slim 176 pages, written in bursts of unpunctuated prose with long spaces, and framed tightly through the eyes of the cat, reacting in real time as their world unravels. Adopting this frame for the novel’s vision puts human behaviour more squarely into question, making it strange and frightening.
Open Throat begins in Griffith Park, where the lion-narrator awakens in their thicket to watch aloof and obnoxious hikers and joggers (‘I try to understand people but they make it hard’), internalising filaments of language while keeping an eye out for an ever-dwindling supply of food and water. This lion is chronically hungry, and they can hear the blood coursing through the veins of passersby, but their curiosity about humans is mostly limited to eavesdropping or protecting an encampment of unhoused people from calculating coyotes. But when one of the hikers — an agitator who roams the mountains posing with a whip, Indiana Jones-style — sets fire to the encampment, the lion is sent reeling, disoriented, towards the flickering city that stretches below, to the hostile place they’ve heard referred to as ‘ellay’.
As the cat crosses traffic, breaks into a zoo, and takes up residence in the basement of a mansion, we learn that flight is a familiar mode: at the tail end of kittenhood, they were chased from the mountains of their birth by their own father, who, like the people pressing in on every side, also wanted more territory: ‘my mother taught me to hunt but my father taught me to be hunted.’ The landscape around them is shrinking, eroding, drying out, and burning up, and Hoke deftly conjures the heartbreak of feeling as though no one else cares; his writing is swollen with the desperate pangs of isolation. This is also the site of the novel’s queer undercurrent—this cat is not looking for a mate, but rather, looking to 'connect', recounting the warmth of a lover who once shared his kills and cave, before dying in a dash across the freeway. Hoke’s cat is likewise labelled with a variety of gendered names and pronouns by their human contacts, pointing perhaps to how human language defaults to categorisation, and the impossibility of those categories to neatly describe lives beyond their immediate grasp.
As he ventriloquises the lion then, Hoke’s voice is humorous and perceptive, but never droll — what makes Open Throat so emotionally incandescent is the sincerity of our feline narrator, whose hunting sprees are shot through with deep tenderness, moments that cut to the bone and gave me an urge to give this apex predator a long hug (and to smite their attackers). To that end, the cat finally experiences something approaching love through their bond with Jane (also known as ‘little slaughter’), a fearless twenty-something witch who finds our narrator hiding in her father’s cellar and keeps them as a companion, even bringing them with her to Disneyland. This, however, is where Hoke asks too much of the reader, who has already come to accept the lion’s prodigious linguistic faculties, but must now also believe that their uncamouflaged presence at an amusement park would go over coolly, or that, later in the novel, they can open car doors with their paws.
At least in the case of language, Hoke makes a meta-gesture toward the task of telling a story for an animal with no other voice: ‘I get down off my sofa and scratch and scratch at [the carpet] and try to claw words into the floor to explain myself / but when I climb back onto the sofa and look down at my work it’s jagged striped with no order or meaning / someday I’ll be able to write what you’re reading.’ Until the cat can speak for themselves, they remain an object of terror and expendability, understood only through a human rubric of absolute domination, their meanings always determined in advance and from without. They form their own language, having learned for instance that it is a time of ‘scare city,’ hewing apart ‘scarcity’ and making it at once a mood, a place, and state of being. Yet Hoke’s project is not so simple as anthropomorphising the cat to elicit empathy; the novel is shot through with moments of ambivalence about closing their gap with humanity. Thinking about their story, the cat wonders if in fact, ‘. . . it won’t ever get written / only growled’, reminding the reader that the account at hand is fundamentally inauthentic. Access to language and to speech frustrates the cat’s relationship with humans, who cannot understand them, though they understand humans all too well — particularly, their cruelty.
The cat’s alterity is insurmountable but replacing it with sameness, or the reproduction of human subjectivity, is ultimately not the solution toward which Hoke writes (though at times it threatens to seem that way). Instead, it is in this voice — equal parts endearing, perceptive, and slicing — that the cat’s counter-theory of humanity is articulated. As the novel comes to a close, the cat makes an impulsive decision to transgress its own ethical boundaries with one spectacular, traffic-stopping attack, narrating how they are killing out of want, not need — ‘just like a person.’ If Hoke could be accused of projecting human qualities onto wildlife, it could just as easily be said that he is hewing apart this very impulse: if we imagine animals as more human-like, why assume that this would be a positive trait?
More recently, P-22 has been considered through fiction. The animal is at the heart of Henry Hoke’s third novel, Open Throat, which the writer dedicates to the late-cougar, writing in the Acknowledgements that he ‘walks beside me in dreams’. Yet in this new book, Hoke does not merely walk with P-22, but speaks for his kind through a first-person, fictionalised account of a lonely, queer mountain lion driven from their habitat. Across fiction, nonfiction, and other projects that combine the two, Hoke has established a pattern of focusing intensely on his chosen subject until they are imbued with a sense of the hyperreal — for instance, in his 2022 memoir, he examined queer boyhood in the American South through the cultural life of stickers. With Open Throat he streamlines this gaze even more tightly, crafting a compact drink of a novel: it is a slim 176 pages, written in bursts of unpunctuated prose with long spaces, and framed tightly through the eyes of the cat, reacting in real time as their world unravels. Adopting this frame for the novel’s vision puts human behaviour more squarely into question, making it strange and frightening.
Open Throat begins in Griffith Park, where the lion-narrator awakens in their thicket to watch aloof and obnoxious hikers and joggers (‘I try to understand people but they make it hard’), internalising filaments of language while keeping an eye out for an ever-dwindling supply of food and water. This lion is chronically hungry, and they can hear the blood coursing through the veins of passersby, but their curiosity about humans is mostly limited to eavesdropping or protecting an encampment of unhoused people from calculating coyotes. But when one of the hikers — an agitator who roams the mountains posing with a whip, Indiana Jones-style — sets fire to the encampment, the lion is sent reeling, disoriented, towards the flickering city that stretches below, to the hostile place they’ve heard referred to as ‘ellay’.
As the cat crosses traffic, breaks into a zoo, and takes up residence in the basement of a mansion, we learn that flight is a familiar mode: at the tail end of kittenhood, they were chased from the mountains of their birth by their own father, who, like the people pressing in on every side, also wanted more territory: ‘my mother taught me to hunt but my father taught me to be hunted.’ The landscape around them is shrinking, eroding, drying out, and burning up, and Hoke deftly conjures the heartbreak of feeling as though no one else cares; his writing is swollen with the desperate pangs of isolation. This is also the site of the novel’s queer undercurrent—this cat is not looking for a mate, but rather, looking to 'connect', recounting the warmth of a lover who once shared his kills and cave, before dying in a dash across the freeway. Hoke’s cat is likewise labelled with a variety of gendered names and pronouns by their human contacts, pointing perhaps to how human language defaults to categorisation, and the impossibility of those categories to neatly describe lives beyond their immediate grasp.
As he ventriloquises the lion then, Hoke’s voice is humorous and perceptive, but never droll — what makes Open Throat so emotionally incandescent is the sincerity of our feline narrator, whose hunting sprees are shot through with deep tenderness, moments that cut to the bone and gave me an urge to give this apex predator a long hug (and to smite their attackers). To that end, the cat finally experiences something approaching love through their bond with Jane (also known as ‘little slaughter’), a fearless twenty-something witch who finds our narrator hiding in her father’s cellar and keeps them as a companion, even bringing them with her to Disneyland. This, however, is where Hoke asks too much of the reader, who has already come to accept the lion’s prodigious linguistic faculties, but must now also believe that their uncamouflaged presence at an amusement park would go over coolly, or that, later in the novel, they can open car doors with their paws.
At least in the case of language, Hoke makes a meta-gesture toward the task of telling a story for an animal with no other voice: ‘I get down off my sofa and scratch and scratch at [the carpet] and try to claw words into the floor to explain myself / but when I climb back onto the sofa and look down at my work it’s jagged striped with no order or meaning / someday I’ll be able to write what you’re reading.’ Until the cat can speak for themselves, they remain an object of terror and expendability, understood only through a human rubric of absolute domination, their meanings always determined in advance and from without. They form their own language, having learned for instance that it is a time of ‘scare city,’ hewing apart ‘scarcity’ and making it at once a mood, a place, and state of being. Yet Hoke’s project is not so simple as anthropomorphising the cat to elicit empathy; the novel is shot through with moments of ambivalence about closing their gap with humanity. Thinking about their story, the cat wonders if in fact, ‘. . . it won’t ever get written / only growled’, reminding the reader that the account at hand is fundamentally inauthentic. Access to language and to speech frustrates the cat’s relationship with humans, who cannot understand them, though they understand humans all too well — particularly, their cruelty.
The cat’s alterity is insurmountable but replacing it with sameness, or the reproduction of human subjectivity, is ultimately not the solution toward which Hoke writes (though at times it threatens to seem that way). Instead, it is in this voice — equal parts endearing, perceptive, and slicing — that the cat’s counter-theory of humanity is articulated. As the novel comes to a close, the cat makes an impulsive decision to transgress its own ethical boundaries with one spectacular, traffic-stopping attack, narrating how they are killing out of want, not need — ‘just like a person.’ If Hoke could be accused of projecting human qualities onto wildlife, it could just as easily be said that he is hewing apart this very impulse: if we imagine animals as more human-like, why assume that this would be a positive trait?