LA Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl [Anglais] [Relié]

An art professor ignores her marital problems while she creates an elaborate, semi-erotic literary fantasy involving 17th-century painter Georges de La Tour in Huddle's beautifully written but awkwardly plotted second novel. Suzanne Nelson, teaching at the University of Vermont, is stifled in her marriage to Jack, a garrulous, outgoing man whom she sees as superficial and annoying. While Suzanne retreats into a fantasy world centered on the aging La Tour's odd relationship with his teenage model from a French village, Jack turns for comfort to old flame Elly Jacobs, who has recently returned to town. At first Suzanne is oblivious to their affair, but when she finally realizes that Jack's wandering is inevitable, she lets him leave to explore his new romance, content to delve further into La Tour's last paintings. After Jack has problems with Elly, he and Suzanne find themselves pulled back toward one another, much to their surprise. Huddle is a graceful, eloquent writer who does his best work in the chapters in which he brings to life La Tour's artistic world and the problematic attraction between a beautiful teenage girl and the artist as an old man. Jack and Suzanne are also well-drawn characters, but Huddle never manages to make the artistic sensuality of La Tour's story resonate with Suzanne's personality or with Suzanne and Jack's romantic history, which never rises above the level of restless bed-hopping. Huddle's talent still shines through here, but this book is a step down from his successful debut.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

In this richly drawn novel about life, art, and the intriguing connections between them, art professor Suzanne Nelson becomes fascinated with Georges de La Tour, the 17th-century French painter famous for his sympathetic depictions of peasants. But as Suzanne discovers in some newly available source material, La Tour's actual conduct with peasants appears to have been violent and unscrupulous. Those conflicts in La Tour's character form the thematic center of the novel while also mirroring the disconnects in Suzanne's own life. Like La Tour, Suzanne's unfaithful boyfriend, Jack, is a duplicitous, self-absorbed man who is also capable of great charm and generosity. Huddle (The Story of a Million Years) explores this intriguing thematic material with considerable resourcefulness and style. Of particular note is his examination of the tensions that come into play between the various characters' public and private selves and how they struggle to identify truth from fiction. Huddle has given us a vividly imagined world full of psychologically complex characters. Recommended for all libraries. Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Huddle's compelling, psychologically nuanced fiction, including The Story of a Million Years (1999), masterfully exposes the complex intuitive agreements intrinsic to even the most enigmatic relationships, and here he reaches new heights of emotional verity and all-out bewitchment. As a teenager, Suzanne, an intellectual wizard compared to her peers, unthinkingly accepts, then betrays the kindness of a desperately shy boy who channels his unspoken feelings into drawings of uncanny power. As a camp counselor, Jack turns his back on a similarly trusting and troubled child. Briefly a painter's model, Suzanne becomes an art historian, Jack a successful businessman; they marry yet never bond. Instead, Jack falls for Elly, a lusty violin-playing scholar, and Suzanne succumbs to long reveries in which she imagines, in astonishingly voluptuous detail, the seventeenth-century painter Georges de La Tour utterly enchanted by a village girl with a strange physical anomaly and a penchant for tale-telling. As each relationship coalesces and dissolves, Huddle brilliantly conveys the eroticism of conversation, often a more intimate exchange than sex, the transforming heat of an intimate's gaze, the magic of music, and all of love that remains silent and withheld. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

In this absorbing novel, the award-winning author David Huddle tells a provocative story involving the life of the mysterious painter Georges de La Tour and the echoes of his work across time.
An art history professor, Suzanne Nelson escapes her failing marriage by retreating into her research and the fertile world of her imagination. La Tour's ability to create luminous portraits of peasants stood in sharp contrast to his aggression toward the poor, but little information about his life exists, and Suzanne finds herself filling in the details, trying to understand how a man capable of brutality could create such beauty. Unwittingly looking to her own life and marriage, she invents La Tour's final painting sessions with a young model, a village girl. When the girl modestly disrobes for the artist, he discovers a marking on her back that she is obviously unaware of. By painting her, La Tour in effect reveals to the girl exactly who she is and who she is not. Her reaction is at once astonishing and utterly warranted. In Suzanne's mind, this encounter becomes a story of truth and lies, art and identity.
Deftly moving between the present and the seventeenth century, Huddle reveals the surprising repercussions of history and art in modern life. In the process he asks the biggest questions: How do we come to define who we are? Which secrets must remain our own and which can we justify giving away? LA TOUR DREAMS OF THE WOLF GIRL is both passionate and fascinating, a wonder of narrative invention and emotional depth.

David Huddle's fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, Story, the New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories. Among his books of short fiction are Tenorman, Intimates, and Only the Little Bone. The recipient of two NEA fellowships, he teaches writing at the University of Vermont and is on the Faculty of the Board Loaf School of English. The author currently resides in Burlington, Vermont.

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