The story is not shouted; it is sighed, sotto voce, in the quietest diction. But, quiet as the diction is, its substance is raw, painful, tortured. There is no way to keep the rawness from distracting us from the formal organization and orchestration going on within each section, each scene, each incident—so that when the novelistic effects do occur, they hit like hammers!

The first monster Delany introduces us to is his narrator, a nameless eleven year old boy in whom practically anything resembling human sensibilities has been numbed or extracted—the first chapter gives us with insidious coolness some of the extraction process—and in whom, by little else than chance conditioning it would seem, a whole set of brutalized and degraded responses has been substituted. Hogg is presented to us through the ironical distancing of this childish and alien mind in a vocabulary that, like Beckett’s seldom exceeds a slightly colloquial Basic English.

The book begins practically in a whisper. But by the time we have finished the first six numberless and nameless chapters, climaxing with Harkner’s self-mutilation, the effect is of one constant shriek—though the diction od any sentence, even here, is the same as in the opening pages: measured, impartial, precise. But to go back, even from here, and reread the opening pages (as I did my second time through the novel) is to hear that shriek from the very beginning. It is our ear that Delany has been tuning, from his very first sentence.

The excuse for the language in which Hogg is written (its directness, its simplicity, its clarity) is that it is the language of a child. Anyone with an ear for the nuances in the development of American prose, however, will hear that it is an artful variation of the language of Chandler—whom no less a figure than André Gide called the finest stylist in America. Granted the tendency of the French to go overboard for things American, there is something real to consider here.