Why does it take a mountain lion to offer the purest distillation of life in Los Angeles? In Henry Hoke’s Open Throat, the humans are there, but they are peripheral to the conditions of hunger, loneliness, and longing for home faced by the novel’s narrator, a big cat living in the Hollywood Hills.
Such a first-lion perspective, so to speak, will evoke for many Angelenos the dearly departed P-22, who, Hoke writes in his acknowledgments, “walks beside me in dreams.” A former instructor at CalArts and a cofounder of the event series Enter>text, Hoke taps into the city’s established relationship with its OG mountain lion celebrity.
We think of P-22 and his kin as wild but transcendent, beautiful but fierce. Yet Hoke ironically humanizes our idea of the mountain lions living beside us, making his narrator a “queer and dangerously hungry” creature who has learned just enough about humans to be mildly repulsed.
“I try to understand people,” the cat observes, “but they make it hard.”
Open Throat is an experimental novel with little capitalization or punctuation. In it, the lion spends most of the day sleeping because “sleep takes my hunger away.” When awake, he spies on the hikers who talk of cars, trauma, New York, pancakes, and what the lion hears as “scare city mentality.” The way the hikers discuss their therapists makes the lion want one. The lion knows he lives beneath the Hollywood sign because all the hikers talk about it.
Hoke’s narrative point of view renders core aspects of Los Angeles—an earthquake (“the shudder”), freeways (“the long death”), the “fucking helicopters,” wildfire, flooding—into defamiliarized experiences, making them startling and fresh. As fireworks (“the sky fire”) explode overhead, the lion thinks, “There are cheers rising from down below like all of ellay is making this happen like the people forgot how dry my life is.” Hearing the hikers read aloud from signs about fire danger and rattlesnakes, he wonders, “Is there a warning sign for me.”
The lion lives in a symbiotic relationship with an encampment of unhoused people, referred to as “my people” in town. Trash from the camp attracts small animals the lion can eat. “I’m the secret member of town,” he reflects. “…I want to thank my people but I know if they see me it’ll fuck up our relationship.”
Hunger is the prevailing sensation of Hoke’s Los Angeles. The first sentence of Open Throat is “I’ve never eaten a person but today I might,” setting the stakes for what’s to come. By the time the lion witnesses a hiker light the encampment on fire, we are rooting for today to be the day.
What we learn of the lion’s past reminds us that we’re all vulnerable animals. He was born “far away where the sun sets” to a “very kind” mother with an insatiable bloodthirst. The father, however, was pure predator, hunting his own family.
“A father to a kitten is an absence,” Hoke writes.
“A grown cat to a father is a threat.”
After his father kills his mother, the lion sets out to cross “the long death”: “I traded old fear for new fear.”
After relocation, the days go on. The lion grows older: “It’s okay,” he says.
“Old is fine.”
“I’m old because I’m not dead.”
He watches two men have sex: “They move like the whole cave wants them to move like a natural part of this world.” The moment brings to mind another lion with whom the narrator once bonded briefly: “When you meet a big cat who will share a kill you can’t let go of him easily.”
After the camp is set on fire, the lion flees the hills, thinking “fire is the only future,” and ends up in the city, befriending a young woman whose father lives in the Hollywood Hills. She decides the lion is the manifestation of a goddess. This time with the girl is at first a welcome break from a lifetime of loneliness.
“If you feel alone in the world,” the lion thinks.
“Find someone to worship you.”
Ultimately, however, such brief domestication does not sit well: “I look around at all the space I have and I think of all the other space in this house and in every house on this street and in all of ellay and I think how the people of my town could be here too.”
“Instead of burning in the woods.”
It is not long before the lion is discovered. When he attempts to flee Los Angeles, he comes face-to-face with the arsonist. Lioning ensues.
The epigraph at the beginning of Open Throat is from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” What lies outside the lion’s existence is a city driven by deprivation that allows only its least vulnerable to feed.
Open Throat reads as if the narrator of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation had become a mountain lion and moved to Griffith Park. Its mosaic prose form makes observations feel like profound wisdom—pronouncements that seem even more powerful coming from a lion living above Los Angeles. When he muses on human behavior and the future of the city, it seems like nothing less than prophecy.•
Chris Daley has written about books, cults, and heartbreak in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, Essay Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Collagist, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She publishes the Submission Sunday newsletter on Substack and designs author websites at chrisdaley.com.
