THE LEOPARD IS LOOSE

A wild cat on the loose in 1950s Oklahoma City crystallizes a boy’s coming-of-age story.

Inspired by an actual incident in 1950, this mostly sweet-tempered tale is narrated retrospectively by Grady McClarty, who recalls being 5 years old in 1952, a transitional time for his family. His father, a test pilot, has died; his mother is getting serious with a new man, presaging a possible move to Texas; and his two uncles are World War II veterans whose PTSD manifests itself in confusing ways. So news that a leopard has escaped its pit at the city zoo exacerbates an already anxious moment. In the week or so that follows, Grady and his brother, Danny, become their uncles’ sidekicks as thousands of self-deputized big-game hunters roam the city stalking their prey. Harrigan has a knack for grand-scale historical writing, both in fiction (The Gates of the Alamo(2000); A Friend of Mr. Lincoln(2016), etc.) and nonfiction (Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas(2019)), and here he strives to expand Grady’s modest bildungsroman into a larger political allegory. In the citywide hunt, stoked by hyperbolic TV talking heads, Harrigan finds an echo of Trump-era inventions of moral panics (“there was something else on the loose that I had no name for and no capacity to identify"); in scenes that put anti-Black discrimination on display, he exposes the persistence of casual racism and how easily it descends into violence. Such attempts to show how the past and present rhyme ride somewhat awkwardly alongside Grady’s more interior story, which involves making sense of his mercurial family and his fixation on childish things. But Harrigan does engagingly inhabit his young hero's mind.

A likable, nostalgic yarn that explores how minor incidents can catalyze into bigger crises.