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- guardian.co.uk,
- Saturday January 06 2001 01.13 GMT
"The emergency room is a very strange, surreal place at times," says Frank Huyler. "You have these very intense moments where you're asking these very personal questions of people who are strangers to you, who often don't know your name and won't remember you, either. There's a facelessness on both sides, and yet you're propelled into moments where you discuss issues that you never would in another world. There is a kind of 'distant intimacy'."
These moments are what Huyler captures in the stories contained in The Blood Of Strangers. Often very short, the individual stories sometimes appear as Weegie-like snapshots of the crash victims, Aids patients, cardiac arrestees and fellow physicians who come through the ER.
Huyler, who has just turned 36, is a doctor practising emergency medicine in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Writing is a sideline; he has had poetry published, but this is his first book. Billed, by his British publisher at least, as "true stories", the collection, in fact, has much more the quality of literary fiction - the writing is pared down and precise. The Doctor's Stories of William Carlos Williams was, Huyler says, his closest model, but the flavour of these, in their clinical detachment, is almost Carver-esque. They are not literal truth, but they are based on real events.
"You tend to find," explains Huyler, "that you're witness to an endless procession of similar events - or maybe dissimilar events - but they share in their intensity and tragedy. They kind of blur together; they become this wash. One of the benefits of writing was that it forced me to step back a bit and try to think about the events from a little more distance and perspective."
Huyler describes himself, here and in the book, in self-effacingly nondescript terms: average height, skinny, with short, brown hair - a "jeans-and-sneakers" kind of guy. Yet, what makes The Blood Of Strangers much richer than a merely random selection of sketches is the subtly-drawn self-portrait that emerges through the stories - charting the mark left by these strangers.
"I didn't know what I would use at first to give them some kind of cohesion," he confesses, "but I settled on using the narrator - my own character development, if you like - for that. But I didn't want to make it all confessional, or self-absorbed and narcissistic.
"I wanted the stories to have the primary impact, but I realised I wanted to put myself in enough to show that they had some effect on me - it's a fine line to walk, I guess."
The ER is, Huyler admits, "an environment rich in stories", but one of his concerns in writing about it was to distance himself from the myths. The problem with Mark Greene and company in the TV drama series ER, says Huyler, is that "they are far too competent".
"Most of what we do in the ER are really small moments, not life and death, not big drama. Only some of the time does that happen, and only some of the time, when it does, can we do anything about it. A lot of the time, people who are going to die are going to die no matter what we do."
What The Blood Of Strangers does par excellence is rehabilitate those "small moments". Huyler has a forensic capacity for observation, possibly because he grew up as something of an outsider. He was born, in 1964, in Berkeley, California. His parents were teachers at international schools and the family had an itinerant, globe-trotting existence. Frank actually went to kindergarten in London, but then, in his early teens, the Huylers moved to Iran, a couple of years before the fall of the Shah.
He vividly recalls the lead-up to the revolution: "It was exciting for me as a 13-year-old, but frightening for my parents." The family got out just in time, catching a flight out the same day as Ayatollah Khomeini's return. Huyler went to high school in Brazil and Japan, then to study at Williams College, Massachusetts - a "small, liberal arts college" - where he majored in English. Only then did he decide on a medical training.
Why, I wonder. "I'm not completely sure," replies Huyler, with a sheepish laugh. "I was always, quite honestly, better at the humanities than the sciences, but somehow the path from studying English, into teaching or whatever, struck me as less practical. At the time, I wanted to do something that would have a real effect on people. It was a mix of a little bit of idealism and a lot of pragmatism."
After medical schooling in North Carolina, he toured around looking for a residency, eventually settling on Albuquerque in 1993. He qualified in 1996, and has been there ever since. He married last year - being so settled is a little strange: "Seeing people age is a novelty." One pragmatic element in Huyler's choice of emergency medicine was that, more than any other branch of medicine, it gave him time to write. He is now at work on a novel, but has no plans to give up the day job at the moment.
"It keeps you grounded," Huyler observes. "It reminds you of many elemental forces that we often don't see in the developed world. It's very easy to hide yourself away, but in an ER room you're constantly reminded of those forces."
• Read an extract from The Blood of Strangers here.
