But there are many other formal excellences in the book: The way in which the opening section first seems a completely unrelated prologue, but turns out to supply so much, both in characters and theme; or Hawk’s bizarrely comic monologue on “his thing” beside the flaming car; or any of the numerous dovetailing ironies of which only the narrator and the reader are aware. (Hogg, for example, never learns that Mr. Jonas is dead; and isn’t this used, in just the tiniest way, to gain sympathy for Mr. Jonas’s unsavory ex-employee?) Then there is the book’s formal hierarchy of monsters: the major monsters, Hogg, Denny, Nigg, Dago, and the narrator, are buttressed by a gallery of minor ones—Pedro, Mr. Alvarez, the Townley brothers, Big Sambo, Rat, Chico, and Hawk—who are highlighted in turn by a Gogolian collection of mini-monsters, some, like Martin Sells, who do not even appear, or others, like Monty, Bill, and Whitey, who merely drift through with only an indication of the horror that might accrue to them.

IV

At this point, having examined both the texture and structure of the book, we can ask the simplistic question “What, then, is Hogg about?” with hope of a non-simplistic answer.

Delany has prefaced his book with an essay which, though it begins by discussing pornography, is primarily about sexism in the novel. It is in turn witty, elegant, and impassioned. My own reaction, when I first read it, was a frank suspicion that the novel could not live up to it.

And indeed, one can make a case that it would be hard to conceive of a more sexist novel than Hogg; but if it is sexist, it is not misogynistic; the range of women characters and their fates, for example, is far greater than, say, in Hitchcock’s somewhat similar Frenzy. And there is an honesty to the sexism that, if not redeeming, is, at least, hopeful. Delany does not commit the particular sexist flaws he describes in his opening essay; and, in a book composed of material such as Hogg, that is an achievement.

But sexism and the treatment of women is the political template Delany asks us to view his novel against. Given the vocation of his main character, and the avocations of most of his minor ones—professional and amateur rape—it is a template that it is hard to let slip too far out of mind.