David HuddleCritiques

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. ***

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. ****

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.

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. ****

This is a beautifully written novel about grief and family.

I am thrilled to have discovered David Huddle - this book is a work of art. He captures human relationships every bit as beautifully and sadly as Richard Yates. Why is this author not more well known or well read? I can't wait to lose myself in another one of his books.

To judge by the author bio, Huddle is one of those writers -- of poetry and essays as well as fiction -- upon whom the literary establishment smiles. This is far from necessarily a recommendation, and indeed about fifteen or twenty pages into this novel I was ready to throw it at the wall on the grounds of Stark Pretentiousness Above and Beyond the Call of Duty. Luckily there wasn't a wall to hand and I persevered, because I ended up enjoying the book really quite a lot. Prissy, fortyish Vermont art history prof Suzanne and her spindoctoring businessman husband Jack are not so much an odd couple as a couple whose ways started diverging in two incompatible directions fairly soon after they married. Now their marriage is clearly falling apart; that Jack finds solace in boffing the earthy Elly whenever he can is a symptom of this rather than, as both he and especially Suzanne believe, a cause. Habitually reserved, Suzanne escapes the turmoil of her personal life by constructing a fantasy about the 17th-century French painter Georges de la Tour; in this extended daydream, de la Tour discovers that Vivienne, the village teenager he has taken on as his new model, has a patch of wolflike hair on the back of her shoulder of which she is (improbably) completely unaware.

What Huddle has constructed with this novel is a sort of rope of stories, and I'd guess it was Story that was really his preoccupation when he was writing it. Whatever, once he'd hooked me I stayed hooked; and by the final page I discovered that Suzanne was a far more interesting person than I'd earlier believed.

Beware of those first fifteen or twenty pages, though.

Perhaps the most apt description of [Nothing Can Make Me Do This] would be that Huddle has assembled a collage. You begin by absorbing the separate components , then step back to look at the whole, whereupon you discover another level of correspondences and meaning. The voices are drawn from three generations of a family. Six perspectives in all, three men and three women: the grandparents (born, I think in the mid-30's), their closest lifelong friend, their daughter and son-in-law, and the grand-daughter. The relationships described extend beyond simple man/woman into grandparents with their grandchildren, mothers and daughters, brothers. One of the great achievements is that what could be bewildering is put forward in small vignettes that work in harmony: brothers traipsing about a neighborhood at night spying through windows, a boy and a priest (not what you think), a childless older man discovering the joy of helping a child, a woman discovering she can't live with a man who can't care about a dog she loves - the revelations are like fiery peppercorns or sweetness bursting in your mouth. It works because the underlying purpose is steady. Boundaries, trespass, barriers -- might be useful descriptive words - not only the barriers that individuals put up between each other, and that couples use to keep others out, but those of knowing and not knowing, and the inevitability, if you let down your guard of revelation that leads to change: "The Eve Collins theory of self-discovery is that you sometimes just unintentionally break through to what you need to know." Trespass too, serves to describe the events literal and internal that lead to revelation. The granddaughter deciding which room in her grandparents empty house would be the right one in which to lose her virginity. Or the grandfather, when a young professor at his first college campus discovering that a place he likes to walk to and has come to consider 'his' is used once a year for a rite of passage ceremony by the students, one he finds so distasteful and upsetting that he is willing to spend hours cleaning up after it. There is also a close focus on sexuality and the boundaries, barriers and trespasses that define a marriage as well as friendships, and family relationships. So many ways to be, both bewildering and reassuring. I admire how different each of the voices are, and how I was eager to read about all of them - the most successful for me were the grandfather, grand-daughter, and Bill the son-in-law, but all of the characters had 'moments'.
Highly recommended! ****1/2½

This novel starts with a woman recalling her affair, at age 15, with an older man, the husband of her mother's friend. Then other people tell their stories, a web of intersected relationships. Everyone has secrets, but they all think they can see through their spouses and friends and know their secrets.
This book gave me a lot to think about, partly because I had a similar affair when I was a teenager, partly because I'm married now and trying to understand my spouse and navigate the balance of keeping my self separate and keeping my secrets, while participating fully in a relationship.

Rather depressing, really, but subtle and quite enjoyable.½

Ugh-- I think the author used the reference to La Tour just to make his book seem weightier and more important, and then neither the art or history had mcuh significance in the book.½