Hunt, Laird

PERSONAL: Married Eleni Sikelianos (a poet); children: Eva Grace. Education: Naropa University, M.F.A.; has also studied at the Sorbonne.

ADDRESSES: Home— Boulder, CO. E-mail— lairdhunt@earthlink.net.

CAREER: Denver University, Denver, CO, faculty member in creative writing program. Former United Nations press officer. Has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France.

WRITINGS

FICTION

The Paris Stories (short stories), Smokeproof Press (Boulder, CO), 2000.

The Impossibly (novel), Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2001.

(Editor) Gojmir Polajnar, Don’t Kill Anyone, I Love You, translated by Aaron Gillies, Spuyten Duyvil (New York, NY), 2001.

Indiana, Indiana: (The Dark and Lovely Portions of the Night) (novel), Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2003.

The Exquisite (novel), Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Fence, Mentor, Unculte, Zoum Zoum, Brick, Conjunctions, and Bomb.

SIDELIGHTS: A creative writing instructor who is the author of short stories and novels, Laird Hunt is known for composing fiction that is experimental and challenging to audiences. Admitting to Andrew Ervin in an interview on the Bookslut Web site that “the reader does need to pull out a mental dance step or two to avoid tripping up” in such works as The Exquisite. The author made no apologies and felt that many readers could negotiate his subtle and recondite narratives. “I do think there are far more readers up for the unexpected than we tend to imagine,” Laird asserted, “and that some few of them might be willing to follow along with a narrator who can’t quite get the who, what, where, when and how to function as much more than a jumble and who, on top of it, has more than one version of events to propose.”

In his debut novel, The Impossibly, Laird is never direct about just what is happening in the plot and why. Apparently, the unnamed narrator and all the other characters he meets are, in one way or another, associated with some sort of powerful and often nefarious organization that rules their lives. Referred to only as “the organization,” the book never says what the organization does or why it often tortures or kills people. The narrator begins his tale as a pawn of the organization, but, through his love for a woman that he eventually loses, resolves later in his life to break off his ties to the organization. Even conversations and events in the novel are obscure, and Laird leaves the mysteries up to his readers to resolve. Within the basic progression of the story, the narrator jumps around chronologically, and his thoughts are desultory as well. “This interruptive narrative seems to be an accurate map of the human mind trying to make sense of the world,” theorized Kelly Everding in a Rain Taxi Web site review. The critic concluded that Laird’s debut “is a challenging and inventive work, alternately chilling and humorous, that breaks new ground in the world of speculative fiction.”

Laird’s novel The Exquisite is no less difficult to figure out. Set shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, the story features two alternating plotlines that seem to feature the same characters in different forms. In one story, a thief named Henry is enamored of the sexy Tulip, who asks him to steal something from the apartment of a man named Kindt. It is Kindt’s business to arrange the fake demises of his clients, but now he seems to ask Henry to “kill” him. In the other story, Tulip is a doctor at a hospital, with Henry and Kindt as her patients. Whether the two tales are related is unclear; neither is it clear whether or not these are the same people. It could be that Henry has gone insane, perhaps because of something that happened during the attacks, or maybe not. In a way, the confusion of the story reflects the confusion in America that followed the September 11 terrorist acts. “The Exquisite is an excellent exploration of a shattered life,” attested Carrie Jones on the KGBBar Web site. “Hunt’s two compellingly imagined shards suggest so many others in such a way as to almost command the reader to question his or her own sense of just what has happened in the last five years.” Matthew Tiffany, writing for the Pop Matters Web site, concluded: “This is an exceptionally well-written and well-constructed story.... Hunt has an easy mastery of noir, and the sheer joy with which he tells this story is addictive. His sentences stretch out with wonderful, funny word choices that come across as perfectly fitting coming from the mouth of a man who finds great delight in holding forth (at length) on the luminescence of herring.”