The High Spirits - Softcover

The relationship between the sexes is one of fiction's well-mined veins, but this collection strikes gold when it focuses on people "with their stories locked inside themselves." A teenaged daughter watches from the sidelines as her parents' marriage disintegrates. An adolescent boy gropes for an understanding of the man he will become. A co-ed reaches vainly through the darkness as her lover plunges to his death in a gorge. Huddle unlocks these characters' stories with a deft narrative touch, sensitive to the evocative details of emotion and conflict. Less successful, though, are the lapses into campus fiction. The English-professor-as-aging-satyr theme smells as stale as faculty lounge air. But the breeze outside the ivory tower is bracingly fresh, and it gives Intimates strength to rise above this shortcoming. Recommended for larger collections.
- Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"Huddle is a master of a prose so clean you can see it shine. It is the vehicle to any insight the reader may come to, and yet it hides from its own insights with the same guileless honesty that makes the characters reveal themselves. It packs a powerful-- and moral-- punch." --Judith Kitchen, Prairie Schooner

"An altogether excellent cycle of stories. . . No merchant of existential dread or suburban anxiety, Huddle's work is a refreshing antidote to much of what passes for contemporary fiction." --Newsday

"The High Spirits explores a special territory-- something of a frontier-- that is distinct from the short story, the novella and the novel. Beyond 'linked stories,' it lacks a name. Nevertheless, it is a territory of subtle beauty and many possibilities. And it is a place where Mr. Huddle clearly finds himself at home." --The New York Times Book Review