My book review in The Dallas Morning News, 1-16-2022:

By Joyce Sáenz Harris
Special Contributor


The Leopard Is Loose.
By Stephen Harrigan.
Knopf. $26. 256 pages.



Austin writer Stephen Harrigan’s new book could hardly be more different from the last one he published: Big Wonderful Thing, a one-volume history of Texas that, at 944 pages, weighed nearly four pounds.

The Leopard Is Loose weighs about a quarter of that. But then, it tells a smaller, far more intimate story seen through the eyes of a boy closely resembling the storyteller. Perhaps that is why so much of Harrigan’s tale rings true; it engagingly draws upon family lore, those dinner-table anecdotes beginning, “Do you remember…?”

It’s easy to step into this reminiscence by 70-year-old Grady McClarty, recalling how a long-ago summer in Oklahoma City changed everything for him. Old Grady candidly acknowledges taking creative liberties with recording young Grady’s memories and emotions; how, he reasons, could a child so young really have clear memories, even during a summer so full of family drama? It is, he says, “as conscientious an effort as I could make with the fragments of memory available to me. I was just a young boy; I wasn’t taking notes.”

In 1952, five-year-old Grady and his six-year-old brother, Danny, are the sons of a former Army nurse, Bethie Brennan McClarty. She married Burt, a dashing Air Corps fighter pilot who survived World War II, only to die piloting a peacetime test flight gone disastrously wrong.

Bethie was pregnant with Grady when she was widowed, and she did what so many young widows do: She moved back home. In Oklahoma City, Grady is born, Bethie goes to work at a hospital, and the McClartys live with Bethie’s parents and siblings in “a kind of family compound.”

This is the kernel of the Leopard narrative — and it’s also, in essence, what happened in real life to young Stephen Harrigan, who was born to his widowed mother in Oklahoma City in 1948. Still, Harrigan cautions in an opening note to readers, while he has “set this novel to some degree within the matrix of my own extended family,” it also “is very much a fictional enterprise,” with historical details changed and key characters wholly invented.

In 1950, a leopard escaped OKC’s Lincoln Park Zoo and became the cause of civic panic, excitement, fear, and plenty of macho posturing by would-be leopard hunters. Harrigan uses this “sensational” news event as the springboard for his novel, but he moves it up a couple of years to the summer of 1952. This makes Grady just old enough to recall the childhood terror of a wild, allegedly bloodthirsty creature on the loose.

While the leopard is the elusive MacGuffin here, the story really is about the McClartys and Brennans at a turning point in their close-knit family life. Harrigan deftly catches the flavorful sense of a place and time as witnessed by a child: Grady watches and overhears much more than his family realizes, even if he doesn’t understand everything yet.

Circumscribed as it is by family and church (the latter is Grady’s weekly trial of itchy wool Sunday suits and unintelligible Latin Masses), “the little world I inhabited still seemed orderly and peaceful” before the leopard’s escape. His grandfather, Chevy dealer Big Dan Brennan, is the linchpin anchoring the family, but all six grownups form a fortress around Danny and Grady.

“I suppose that security was in part an illusion, a spell that all of the adults actively worked to create and maintain for the two fatherless boys who had landed in their midst,” Harrigan writes. “They intended to start the world anew with us, to keep us innocent of the war that in some sense had created us, had made us half-orphans.”

The boys do not remember or miss Burt, their father. For Grady, “it was the three of us who made up the irreducible family core. …It was the sense that my identity did not really exist beyond my mother’s and my brother’s, that nature and circumstance had compressed the three of us into a nuclear tightness.”

But along with the leopard’s escape, startling new experiences invade Grady’s sanctuary. An otherworldly visit from a passing comet; an encounter with a segregationist bullying a young Black girl at the local lunch counter; the boys’ uncles going wild with excitement, grabbing their guns and heading out to join the leopard hunt despite their father’s disapproval.

Most puzzling for Grady is the sudden appearance of Hugh, a serious suitor for Bethie. Hugh ticks all the boxes: He is a handsome, well-mannered bachelor, gainfully employed in the oil business, and best of all, he’s a Catholic who is good to his old mother.

But Hugh works in Midland, Texas. So how, Grady wonders, can Bethie even consider marrying him and leaving Oklahoma City, leaving the family?

As hot summer days pass, the runaway leopard is glimpsed here and there, and cracks begin to show in the comfortable Brennan-McClarty family compound. Change is inexorably coming, and young Grady is powerless to stop adults from making decisions that will affect his entire life.

But we already know, from the novel’s opening, that old Grady is writing these memories from Midland. We know he had a career being what Big Dan also was: the general manager of a Chevrolet dealership. His youthful dreams of becoming a writer have been put away with his “unfinished and hopelessly unfocused historical novel about the early days of oil exploration in the Permian Basin.”

Perhaps it’s just as well. This story, not the other, was the story he really needed to tell.


Joyce Sáenz Harris is a freelance writer in Dallas.

Grady McClarty is enjoying retirement from his car dealership in Midland, Texas, when a historian in Oklahoma City asks him for an oral history of the time when a leopard got loose from the city zoo in 1952. Only five at the time, Grady is one of the few people who remembers the terror and excitement, and who played a role in the resolution. Rather than record, Grady writes a remembrance of the time and place, a beautiful expression of a nation and a family in broken-hearted yet optimistic times.

Grady, his mother, and his older brother move back to Oklahoma after his fighter test-pilot father is killed before Grady’s birth. They move in with his grandparents, younger aunt and two uncles, both World War Two veterans, as was his mother, who was an army nurse. As his consciousness develops, Grady begins to understand the tensions in his world of loving adults. His uncles drink too much, feel anger and PTSD– ignored at that time–and often put their dearly beloved nephews in awkward situations. They love to visit their grandfather’s car dealership and it’s there where they first sense racial tension of the times.

The escaped leopard brings everything to a boil. The city bristles with armed citizens and people taking pot-shots at all kinds of things. The boys are thrilled and terrified, and the uncles are armed. Mom and aunt are exasperated. The leopard is not to be seen.

What I love about Stephen Harrigan’s books is the way he infuses every page and situation with humanity, possibility, and grief. “Remember Ben Clayton” and “”Gates of the Alamo” are two wonderful historical novels linger long in readers’ memories. “The Leopard is Loose” is a deceptively simple story that will linger in your mind