Henry Hoke
Open Throat: A Novel
Picador / 2024 / 176 pp / $17.00 Paperback
Reviewed by Delaney Aby Saalman / January 2024
“I’ve never eaten a person but today I might,” boldly begins Open Throat: A Novel, a finalist for the 2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction by Henry Hoke. Open Throat is a ravenous venture into the modern human condition as seen by an unlikely cat-eyed spectator: a ruminative, queer mountain lion tragically misplaced in the Hollywood Hills. The cat, emaciated both physically and spiritually, spends their painfully aimless and hungry days eavesdropping into the conversations of the hikers roaming through the drought-ridden landscape all while facing the dilemma of to eat or not to eat the strange bipedal inhabitants that share the stark environment. As the conversations of the hikers summon memories of the cat’s tumultuous past, like raising spirits from the dead, the cat’s own moral grapples and innermost thoughts, juxtaposed against the vignettes of human life given by the hikers, provide readers with an outside perspective of the human experience through the lens of someone trapped in a vacuum of isolation, feeling “slow and starved and waiting to connect.” Hoke has miraculously sculpted a wild animal who comes more alive with humanity than any actual human featured in these pages.
When turning to the first page of Open Throat, readers might first assume that they’ve stumbled into a poetry book. Hoke’s composition of the story abandons the traditional prose paragraphing style, capitalization, and punctuation in favor of a far more purposeful stylistic choice to make every word count. As the cat narrates their surroundings, their thoughts come to us one line at a time in a way that creates a definite impact out of every string of words. This style of writing turns Open Throat into a piece that feels like many different genres at once: it reads like poetry, like philosophy, and like a memoir—all while remaining a deeply enthralling fictive narrative. More often than not, our narrator’s insights come to feel like ancient proverbs:
a father to a kitten is an absence
a grown cat to a father is a threat
Hoke’s brilliant treatment of space on the page also produces a book with a compulsive nature—Open Throat absolutely demands to be read in one sitting. Along with its swift pace and low word count, this aspect increases its chances of re-readability. It certainly holds the potential to become a well-worn favorite that readers find themselves flipping through time and time again, with every return to the cat’s reflective prowls feeling as fresh as the first.
But the most astounding aspect of Open Throat is the shocking amount of relatability that causes the pages of this short novel to feel electrically resonant. Not a single reader of this book will be a queer mountain lion, yet through the magic that Hoke conjures, readers will come to see that somehow that big cat rests within each of them. Hoke has produced an imaginative and evocative supernova of storytelling; reading it comes to feel like looking into a mirror at a time when we least expect to find our own reflection. Hoke allows his big cat to tap into our own consciousness, presenting us with a narrator who longs for our own longings and struggles against our own struggles despite the cat’s apparent confusion regarding people and society—perhaps opening a larger evaluation of our own inability to understand our fellow humans despite being able to share their species and language: “I try to understand people but they make it hard.”
The cat is strikingly cognizant in their internal battles against past trauma, loss, loneliness, and the existential dread that comes with being a denizen of “scare city,” whether you’re a feline or a human.
a therapist is something I want
I don’t know if I feel good or bad
if feeling hungry is bad then I almost always feel hungry so maybe I almost always feel bad
a therapist can help me with this
a therapist can explain why I have a shudder inside after the shudder outside is over.
Countless thoughts from the narrator echo this potent sense of emotional complexity throughout the novel.
. . . what scares me most is what I don’t understand
. . .
I have so much language in my brain
and nowhere to put it
. . .
I want to do the opposite I want to go to a place where I won’t be hated
. . .
any sec I could step off a cliff
I think I’ve always felt this way
This sharp-witted sense of self-awareness showcased in the cat’s psyche is uncanny in its ability to bridge the gap dividing human readers and a mountain lion narrator. These diaristic musings quickly come to sound like the sage voice of a generation, enhanced by the cat’s unique idiolect that causes their thoughts to feel intimately distinctive. Hoke’s narrator becomes a sort of whiskered Holden Caulfield whose immense sensitivity resonates with a modern-day malaise. The thoughts imparted by the cat insist on being scrawled into teenage notebooks and shouted from rooftops like anthems from a favorite punk-rock band. But at the same time the cat remains deeply mature with a wisdom that becomes poetic in the book’s most showstopping moments.
I think I’m kind of a poet
because when I finally find a deer left behind by a herd
its legs broken and stuck in a rock
even though I know I shouldn’t
know it’ll make the meat spoil quicker
I eat the heart first
Ultimately, Open Throat is a tale of hunger—both literally, as the famished cat slowly starves within the barren terrain, and figuratively, as our protagonist craves a connection to make them feel whole in an estranged world plagued by wildfires and cell phones. “Who would I call what would I say where would my voice go,” the cat yearns as they watch the world communicate in a foreign, forever-unlearnable language. The divide between the species turns the cat into a lonesome alien imprisoned by the torturous role of silent observer. And despite touching on nearly every aspect of today’s contemporary world, ranging from technology to environmentalism to gender identity and sexuality, this book’s obvious flair for observing modernity, as we know it today, somehow doesn’t confine it within its timeframe. Open Throat already feels timeless in its capacity to speak about the enduring aspects of human nature, whether they’re for better or for worse. The sentiments expressed within Open Throat will no doubt resonate long past its publication date, persisting through the years to be cradled by later generations who will rightfully shelve it beside other iconic Californian classics such as Play It as It Lays, Less Than Zero, Big Sur, and Ask the Dust.
It feels rare to discover a classic in the making, but Open Throat is just that rare a book. It stands alone as something truly sui generis. It’s astoundingly one of a kind, luminously astute, and heartrending at its core. Hoke offers readers a walk on the wild side of the Hollywood sign—at times with a contagious sensitivity and at other times with retractable claws extended and fangs bared. An offering, as well, to become transformed by the sight of the world as seen by a once-in-a-lifetime narrator.
Delaney Aby Saalman is an MFA candidate at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She spends her time reading and writing books, watching movies, rambling around Kentuckiana, and nighthawking. She has a passionate love for homegrown tomatoes, wearing sunglasses at night, and every dead possum on the side of the road.