In the other, the abortive encounter of the director and Honey-Pie, one of the participants utters only a single word.

But the book does go beyond this—not in spite of the author’s political concerns, but because of them; it is a mark of his political intelligence that, feeling as he does, he has not tried to write a book about women; the author is, we know, a man (and a black man), as Mrs. Stowe was white. Unlike Mr. Stowe, he did not try to write a book about “life among the lowly.” The book is about life among the monsters. And, where women do come into it, he has done better than most. At this particular moment, that may be all a man can do. Delany has shown men in their most psychotic relations, with each other, and with women. Women’s rage at what in this situation affects them, as well as their reactions to and their actions against it, are subjects a woman might be able to handle with more authority, if not passion. I think this is the book Delany, in his preface, says he is waiting for.

So am I.

In his preface, Delany claims that his book, in personal terms, is as honest as he can make it. There is a similar claim in the dedication to his first anti-pornographic work, The Tides of Lust: “This is an artificial, extravagant and pretentious book …” he claims of the earlier novel, in a cunningly accurate assessment: “… But it is honest before its artifice….” Honesty is, apparently, important to him in erotica. The first book was a cluster of bright fragments, here a Jamesian pastiche on necrophilia, there a surrealistic nightmare of copulating chimera, now some elegant essays on the significance of the erotic interspersed with monologues of transcriptive doggedness by illiterate sociopaths about their sexual disasters, all strung, catch as catch can, on a modern Faust story set on the Texas coast.

It is flamboyant, it is dazzling, an anthology of brilliant verbal show pieces that, ultimately, aims at a serious point.

In Hogg, however, the extravagance and the pretension have been set by. And the artifice is so rich it has become art. Hogg is a novel, a novel that, in the face of monumentally unpalatable material, can move us, can touch us. I feel it is the more important book; and the more significant.

But if a political template helps us trace our way in it, points out some of the intelligence as well as some of the failures in it, that template is not the significance itself. Art that is exhausted by the politics around, above, and beneath it tends to be transient and, ultimately, lifeless.

We are closer to the significance of Hogg with such bald statements as:

It presents the horrible in the world.

What it has to say about it is even more horrible.