Justin Brouckaert
Daniel’s starting to think that this is his problem altogether: going through life asking for permission. Little Gentleman is just a nice way to say Little Baby, after all.
Both Hill and Maryanne prove to be more complex characters than their
children paint them. Their lives, separated, are heartbreaking. Hill lives alone, drinking and trying to trap coyotes while raising a coydog that eventually turns against him. Daniel’s mother is working hard to put Daniel on a different track than his sister, to get him to college, but she is ultimately met with resistance from Daniel in one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, when her Little Gentleman violently asserts himself. Hill and Maryanne’s sections are rife with memory and forget, a desire to go back and do things differently, replaying everything that went wrong and the small hopes they have to salvage the good parts of their lives.
In “Short Story: A Process of Revision,” Antonya Nelson talks about
placing characters in what she calls transitional moments, using approximate psychological, physical, biological or intellectual markers to craft characters on the brink of great change. Part of what makes Crutchfield’s characters so compelling, I think, is that they are all, in each entry, positioned in transitional moments, circumstances that create great tension, each section flirting with a breaking point.
There is simply too much going on in this book to contain in a single review,
but I would be remiss if I didn’t talk briefly about coyotes, which Crutchfield incorporates smoothly and masterfully into the narrative. They begin in the distance, mostly heard and not seen. They are almost metaphorical this way,
123