Novelist Pete Hautman, Brother to Famed Duck Painters, Writes His Own Lane



In most families, the brother who has written 34 novels and bagged a National Book Award—that would be the famous one. Not so for the seven Hautman siblings who grew up in St. Louis Park. For them, the famous siblings are always the Federal Duck Stamp Contest–winning boys: Joe (six-time winner of the national contest), Jim (six-time winner), and Bob (three-time winner). You’ll see them on CBS News! Read about them in The Washington Post and The New York Times! And if you look closely, you can observe their actual paintbrushes and duck mounts in Fargo. You can also hear them lovingly ribbed and so immortalized in the background of the movie, the greatest morality play of a film to ever shoot in Minnesota.

You know the scene: when Marge the cop’s husband, Norm, an aspiring duck painter working on a submission for the duck stamp competition, says, “Found out the Hautmans are entering a painting this year.” Marge replies, “Aw, hon, you’re better than them.” Norm warns, “They’re real good.” It’s an insider moment just for Minnesotans aware of the little bit of a miracle that was St. Louis Park in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s when the Coen brothers and Hautman brothers grew up seven doors down from one another, in the mix with other St. Louis Park world challengers, including Al Franken and Tom Friedman.

In his 2018 book Otherwood, the novelist brother, Pete Hautman, describes that world—rigid suburbs against the expansive woods that would be partly developed for car dealerships while the rest would become the Westwood Hills Nature Center. When a Jewish girl from the Frankel family and a nonreligious Christian boy become soulmates, playing among fallen trees, time-traveling through woods that become wild or a shopping mall, their friendship tugs the kids and parents into futures striped with both hope and regret.

At the end of the movie Fargo, after all the bloodshed, Marge returns to Norm for the scene establishing that all is right with the moral world once again. “They announced it,” Norm greets Marge. “Three cent. The Hautmans’ blue-winged teal got the 29 cent.” It feels like a secret statement of identity: You know who’s good at art making? Brothers from the block, be they filmmakers, painters, or authors. It doesn’t matter if that’s not quite how duck stamps really work—they’re not used for postage. (The Federal Duck Stamp currently costs $25 and is necessary for a valid duck-hunting permit. About 1.5 million are sold every year. The program began in 1934, and to date, the money has gone to help preserve six million acres of waterfowl habitat. It’s America’s only national art contest.)

When I meet the famous author Pete Hautman to talk about The Rat Queen—his 34th book, an ambitious, propulsive, layered fairy tale for kids—our conversation keeps circling back and back again to his famous brothers; to Fargo; to Elaine, the mom of this successful clan, whose work decorates every room in his home. Hautman seems more comfortable talking about his star siblings than his own work. So, I drop down for a moment to play with his tiny dogs, Baudelaire and Gaston, and think about how strange it must be to be part of Minnesota’s own version of a family of geniuses, like J. D. Salinger’s Glass family or maybe the Royal Tenenbaums. All of Hautman’s many books are funny, full of sly jokes and wry observations, and as we talk of his mother and brothers, I think, He’d rather be in the kitchen making food and making jokes.

Pete Hautman, now 70, lives in Golden Valley, not too far from some of those enormous cottonwood trees of his youth, the ones with the fluttering crowns you see every time you zip down Highway 100. His home—a 1948 brick ranch with that low-slung, wide hip roof—evokes a time of The Dick Van Dyke Show, kidney-shaped coffee tables, and little poodles on dainty leashes. The poodle on guard here is Gaston, a vigilant brown character with a blood vendetta against squirrels trying to breach the vegetable garden. Gaston is ably assisted in his work by Baudelaire, a rescue that’s a little papillon and a lot of exuberant fluff.

The dogs have French names because Hautman’s longtime romantic partner, writing partner, and housemate, mystery writer Mary Logue, finds French names for dogs amusing. Logue is famous for her Claire Watkins and Brigid Reardon mysteries, though she ranges out of genre, too—like when she wrote children’s book Sleep Like a Tiger in 2012 and snagged the biggest award in picture books, the Caldecott.

Peek into the Hautman-Logue writers’ ranch on a sunny day, and you’ll likely find Baudelaire and Gaston sleeping in sunbeams while Hautman and Logue are in adjoining offices typing or sitting at the Danish modern dining table, going over printouts of one another’s manuscripts (they’re each other’s first readers). Hautman has dark brown hair, thick Buddy Holly glasses, dark eyes, and the sort of writer’s face that’s alternately bright-eyed and probing and at other times private and absent as he withdraws into his musing place. Logue, in contrast, has a pixieish air. She blows into a room like a bright wind of good mirth, to the yipping delight of the tiny dogs, then blows along. Hautman watches her like she’s the ballerina who climbed down from the jewelry box: What surprising luck. Interestingly enough, Logue’s sister Dodie, an artist, married Bob Hautman. Seems like Logue sisters and Hautman brothers get along great.

As we start to dig into his varied works, I’m determined to find a way to put his enormous oeuvre, some 34 books, in some kind of context. Not an easy task. At the beginning of his career, Hautman tended to write wry books for adults, like his poker caper Drawing Dead. Then, he moved into books for younger readers, writing some for teens, like his National Book Award–winning Godless. The work grapples with the meaning of faith and church and the value of terrestrial experiences in the face of eternal unknowns—it also includes a bunch of very recognizable kids messing around at the base of a very recognizable Twin Cities ring suburb water tower. He has written a little sci-fi, like the Klaatu Diskos trilogy, and a little in the world of lifelike tales for kids, like his book Slider, about competitive eating and finding your place in a world with siblings who have more needs than you. He’s also popped back into writing for adults, like his casino caper The Prop.

I ask him how he came to write so widely. He tells me there used to be fewer rules when you wrote for kids; it was an unguarded playground. His latest, The Rat Queen, is a Harry Potter–sized tale about the benefits that accrue to those who personally reckon with their own sins. It is Hautman’s most Catholic book since Godless, kind of like C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, but for the chicken-nugget set.

Taken altogether, Hautman’s oeuvre is hard to make sense of—he tends to like to take a genre book, like middle grade or sci-fi, and make it weird and funny and deep. A little like Kurt Vonnegut, except Vonnegut only wrote 22 books, all told. He goes where the story takes him, Hautman tells me, in terms of audience and genre. People have tried to make him do things, like when his parents tried unsuccessfully to make him go to Catholic school at Good Shepherd in Golden Valley, but it never sticks. “When I was 12, I wanted to start every book with, ‘And then the world blew up.’ It took me years to understand an event in the book could be a broken fingernail. It’s what it means to the character. After I won the National Book Award, I heard my editor say, ‘See? You just let him do what he wants.’ I thought, Oh, it’s over for you. I’m unchained.”

“Are you Kilgore Trout?” I ask, referencing the Kurt Vonnegut alter ego who churned out genre books that contained the secrets of life. “Oh, God, no,” Hautman laughs, and he tells me who he really is: the last child in the woods (besides all his siblings and the rest of those St. Louis Park world-conquerors).

“I don’t think parents today could even understand how much freedom we had. If they did, they’d probably call the cops,” he begins. Freedom to use tools to make woods stuff, freedom to get jobs and buy boats for water-and-woods stuff, freedom to take buses downtown and to use Mom’s good art stuff to make art. He takes me on a tour of his mom’s paintings.

Elaine Hautman was the rare 1960s mom who never abandoned her own art making, despite welcoming seven kids into her family and the 1,200-square-foot rambler they shared. “She was always, always a painter, with an easel set up in her bedroom or another room,” recalls Pete Hautman. She’d let any passing kid use her good art crayons, her good tempera paints. When they showed her what they’d done, she offered pointed critiques.

Meanwhile, dad Tuck Hautman—attorney, duck hunter, duck decoy maker, and the first of the family’s duck painters (his biggest duck painting now hangs on the mantelpiece of Joe Hautman’s Plymouth home)—would pile up canvasbacks and mallards on tables, giving his future duck-painting sons the same chance to learn about duck anatomy that Beatrix Potter gained from trapping and flaying rabbits before she embarked upon her paintings for the Peter Rabbit books.

“My mom was always painting. Always,” Joe Hautman tells me on the phone from his studio. “She was an amazing person. Interested in everything. Very positive, but she wasn’t afraid to look at anything and critique it: ‘I don’t care for this or those.’ And then she’d sit for hours thinking about what could make something better.”

It was those kitchen-table art critiques that the duck-painting Hautmans now credit with their current success, with no perceived flaw escaping scrutiny. Elaine Hautman, who grew up a Wahpeton bank teller’s daughter, died in 2017, but I got a sense of her plain talk in a 1995 interview she gave to The Washington Post: “I never really thought the boys showed that much artistic talent,” she said. “They always had their crayons, and they could always draw nicely. I guess other people thought that was unusual, but to us it was just sort of normal.”

Normal, too, was Tuck Hautman building his own extension onto their St. Louis Park rambler and helping his kids subdivide the basement into bedrooms with curtains and not objecting when his oldest hung a door from the basement ceiling with chains—to use as a bed. “With nine people and one bathroom, if I wanted any privacy, I’d have to go into the woods,” recalls Pete Hautman today. (All the Hautmans share the same sense of an entirely permeable membrane between their home and “the woods.”)

Eventually, with an eye toward getting even more freedom than he already had, Pete Hautman got a job as an ashtray emptier and pin chaser at Carriage House Lanes and started taking the bus downtown to Shinders and a used bookstore called the Book Exchange. “I could fill up a grocery bag for two bucks,” he recalls. “Used comic books, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, sci-fi, you name it.” “Mad Magazine?” I ask. “God, yes. Mad Magazine was like our bible.”

He started writing, and illustrating, his own comic books. He became, remarkably, the only of the Hautman kids to go to art school, at MCAD. But that didn’t last, and eventually Hautman sold his comic books to buy a car, drove his paintings to the dump, and left art school. “He was the definition of what was cool and what wasn’t cool,” recalls Joe Hautman. “You never knew where he was going to go or what he was going to do. We were all in awe of him.”

He took a class in suspense at The Loft, and when it was over, his teacher, Mary Logue, asked him on a date. They bonded over a shared love of The Suicide Commandos and The Wallets, and now, 32 years later, they’re still together.

“I first liked Pete because of his cowboy boots,” Logue recalls. “He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s a really good cook. It’s nice to live with another writer. He gets it when I’m just wandering around the house aimlessly—he understands I’m working on a scene and just noodleheaded.”

The two also have a house in Stockholm, Wisconsin, and when she needs more quiet to write, Logue tends to head out there on her own, leaving Hautman to his lifelong psychic territory of the near western suburbs. “Because we’ve been together so long, we’ve worked out this thing,” says Logue. “If I’m starting a new book, 20 or 30 pages in, I’ll show him to get his take. Am I crazy? Is this a bad idea? We talk about it. After that, we don’t tend to show each other anything until we’ve got a good solid draft—you can only read a book for that first time once.”

When asked about what distinguishes this creative family, she says, “I’d say if anything, the Hautmans just grew up comfortable getting criticism.”

“Are they the Minnesota Glass family, or the Royal Tenenbaums?” I ask Logue.

“A teeny bit.  I think the main thing they did so right was they just let their kids be. They let them be. Parents used to be more loving and supportive. It’s weird watching people try to parent today; they’re so invasive. When Pete and I grew up, we had to come home for dinner, and that was about it. We could read or play outside all day long.”

The duck-stamp-painting Hautmans regularly convene for Elaine-style comprehensive critiques of their art, a tradition that continues to inform their wild success. Meanwhile, Pete Hautman and Mary Logue have created the same supportive critique dynamic in their little ranch house.

In The Rat Queen, Pete Hautman creates a world I’ve come to know as very Pete Hautman–esque. It’s quiet suburbia, where recently built houses are set hard against lands where children go for solitude and risk. The hero, Annie, is desperate to get out of a dire situation and into public school. But she’s in a study, writing quietly, forced to put her notes silently in a hole. The absolute distillation of any writer’s life? Perhaps. Soon enough, Annie must grapple with the very nature of sin: Does reckoning with it strengthen our souls? Or is the ease of blithely never considering your deeds better?

I’ll let you read it to find out. The Rat Queen is a great book, profound and playful. Reading it left me convinced of one thing: Freedom is a word much talked about but little experienced nowadays—except by one particular band of kids from a different time who sprung out of St. Louis Park with the very strong sense that when life has no limits, anything is possible, which means that the only thing putting limits on this big world is the morality you find inside. 





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