INTIMATES: A Book of Stories [Signed presentation copy]

In this daring, and often dazzling, collection of stories, David Huddle gently scrutinizes the marvelous complexities (and endless permutations) of male-female encounters. In doing so, he again confirms his place among those few writers who can unfailingly capture, with a wry eye and unvarnished prose, both the most monumental and the most minute meetings between the sexes, those vertiginous moments that can change the directions of our lives (and can also pass unnoticed until many years after the event). Here is thirteen-year-old Angela on a trip to Scotland, experiencing the first ache of adolescence while falling in love with a black male model. And here is a professor caught in his study with a female student stretched out on his desk - nude. Huddle is always measuring that fine tension between fidelity and infidelity, that line between probity and license. He doesn't sit as a judge, but records these moments with both art and grace in a sweet and subtle prose that is guileless and wholly believable. Whether his subject is an aerobics instructor bent on revenge, or a chance, and sexually intimate, encounter on an airplane, David Huddle is a writer who is always in complete control, always managing to expose new facets in the ageless and fascinating terrain of male-female topography.

The 13 stories in this fourth collection from Huddle ( The High Spirits ) are told in a voice that is both analytical and foreboding, giving these tales of love and seduction a kind of of gothic realism. In ``Scotland,'' a woman remembers touring that country when, as a teenager, she accompanied her wealthy mother, who was fleeing an abusive husband; in ``A Little Sawtooth,'' an older man recalls his grade-school days with an attractive, somber classmate. The stories come to life because of Huddle's clear, unpretentious style, reminiscent of the mixture of bewilderment and certainty found in the work of Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver. Two of the best entries, ``Henry Lagoon'' and ``Collision,'' are tense and melancholy, with a feel for small-town and college-town America. In fact, most of the pieces deal with academic life in one way or another, with several tracing the career of Frank Riggins, a tenured poet at Vermont College who is caught in an erotic (but chaste) encounter with a student in the poignant ``The Hearing.'' Although several of the tales are first-rate, one feels that Huddle is a writer in search of a story or character that he has not found on his fictional campuses, perhaps one who he--and we--can sympathize with a bit more.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.