David Huddle

What I love about Huddle's work is that he is always up to something, experimenting. That said, not every experiment is going to work -- or work for everyone. In this novel the story goes back and forth from George de La Tour, a French Baroque painter from the 17th century, to present-day Burlington, Vermont with little stops in Manhattan and Virginia up in the mountains where the two main characters come from, one from the city (Jack) and the other from a rural backwoods town (Suzanne). Suzanne is the first of her family to go to college and she is, by her own words, "a phenomenon". Jack is an ordinary likeable fellow of the middle upper crust. Well, so they marry and Jack goes into advertising, a salesman is what he is, and Suzanne becomes a tenured art prof at the University of Vermont. We go between their story and Suzanne's imagined story of de la Tour's last painting, of a girl with a blemish, a small pelt of fur on her back. They develop a relationship that goes bad. In fact, most relationships seem to falter whenever people try to open up to each other. I could, if I spent the time on it, get what he was up to, but other things didn't work for me, to do with the sorts of details Huddle chooses to highlight about people which felt, simply, like the bit of fur on the girl's back, superficial. But Huddle is always worth a try! His poetry is wonderful, by the way. ***… (meer)

So, what if by using microscopic drones, triangulation and a few other clever doodads, you could locate and assassinate anyone from a distance? Untraceable, I'm saying. What would you do with that power? The main characters here start with the wish to make the world a better place. Instead they find themselves in an ethical tangle and at risk of their lives. Huddle doesn't go into the speculative fiction stratosphere, he sticks close to home, imagining what two conscientious and well-meaning people might do with this power and what it might do to them. Huddle could maybe have dug deeper, but I don't think that was his aim, he wanted, I think, to keep it at an 'ordinary' believable "this could be you" level. This is a very good novel that hasn't received the attention it deserves. ****… (meer)

A magnificent voice. These poems read like stories that give an intimate peek into Huddle's life, particularly his growing-up years. He is courageously honest, able to express regret—but instead of shaking my head at him, I shook my head at myself, recognizing my own flaws and my fear of expressing them on paper. There were also nostalgic descriptions of family life that brought me back in time and made me smile recalling my own memories. A poem that made me laugh in the beginning ("Obnoxious / boy that I was, / God gave me zits / to keep me meek" or "I know what they say—it was her silence / I married her for . . .") took completely different turns than what I'd expected. Each poem spoke to me deeply and I may have had trouble choosing a favorite if not for his final poem, "Beautiful Aunt." Just when I thought it couldn't get better, he saved the best for last.… (meer)

What makes this book unusual and interesting is the narrative mode. Huddle uses the collective "we," the voice of the impossible number of children whose mother is dying of cancer to tell the story of her last few months. It read sometimes like a fantasy of a "good death," sometimes like a paean to the sturdy yeomanry -- which the Faulkes represent--good solid hard-working, no-nonsense people of no interest to anyone but themselves. The point is the ONLY thing about them that isn't ordinary is that there are so many of them and, except that now their mother is dying and has become somehow unordinary, beautiful, transcendent and not just in their eyes, but by everyone who sees her. The "we" works I think, the individuality of the children coming through as the "we" shifts to describing and recording individual dialogue and specific descriptions or stories about a particular kid or incident. The writing is smooth and the book flows along, not confusing or hard to read at all. I was tempted to write down all the names of the kids and their ages to see if I could figure out if the "we" voice was a particular one of them and that I could puzzle it out. . . but I let it be. ****… (meer)