La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl: A Novel [Paperback]

David Huddle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618340777
• ISBN-13: 978-0618340774
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting and contemporary, January 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (Hardcover)

I've been a fan of Huddle's writing since his early short story collections, but this is his best work yet! The novel is eerie and familiar at the same time. Set in present-day Burlington, Vermont (with places those who've been there will definitely recognize), and in the past of 19th century France, the story surrounds the later-years in the life of the strange artist, Georges de la Tour. A professor in VT is writing a paper on La Tour, while at the same time her marriage crumbles. She becomes immersed in a fantasy world, imagining the story behind one of La Tour's paintings- the Wolf Girl. I won't tell any more, because it needs to be a surprise, but I really enjoyed this. A great book for anyone interested in art!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars RUNNING, RUNNING..., October 6, 2002

By 

Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (Hardcover)

LA TOUR DREAMS OF THE WOLF GIRL is my first exposure to the work of David Huddle - and he's a very talented craftsman. The transitions between present-day Vermont (and Appalachia) and 17th century France are seamless - in the hands of a less competent writer they might easily have been clumsy and disruptive to the narrative. Huddle has a discerning eye when it comes to the human psyche and its accompanying emotional baggage, and he lays out his observations for the reader in several ways - direct, subtly oblique, and various `grey areas' in between the two.

We see La Tour through the eyes of a professor of art history at the University of Vermont, Suzanne Nelson. She is writing a dissertation on the artist, and she focuses her attention - and her imagination - on a particular painting, the last one of LaTour's life. He has chosen as his model a village girl, the daughter of the local shoemaker. We see him strut into the village with his retinue of dogs, knowing full well how the scene will play itself out before him. He will make his offer to the shoemaker, who will at first refuse to allow his daughter to pose in the nude for the artist (despite his advanced age and the unlikelihood of anything improper occurring), then the two will haggle over price and social considerations - and in the end, the deal will be made, and the girl will come to his villa to pose for him. LaTour is assured that everything will happen as he imagines it - and to a point, events unfold as he predicts. It is when the girl arrives for her first sitting, and he finds that she is both more intelligent and self-assured than he could have dreamed, that he discovers that he will indeed paint her - his advanced age and his arthritic pains had convinced him that he was merely luring her into his studio to pose for his eyes. When she disrobes for the first time before him, and he sees that she is marked on her back with a thatch of wolf-like hair, stretching from near her shoulder blade to her spine, he is transfixed - and he is further moved to discover that she knows nothing about this unique trait.

As Vivienne continues to make visits to LaTour's studio, over the course of a few months, the painting progresses. LaTour saves the addition of the wolf-patch until the last, knowing that as soon as she sees it, she will feel violated and betrayed - both by the artist and her parents. Over the course of this time, she has come to be more comfortable in the artist's presence - he has drawn her out into conversations by posing questions to her about her daily life in the village, and she has been surprised to find herself eager to talk to him. She also is amazed to realize, toward the completion of the painting, that she has been in effect lying to LaTour - that the stories she has told have been embellishments of reality, sometimes complete inventions. He has taught he to lie by giving her to opportunity to do so with impunity.

All of this is of course a product of the imaginings of Professor Nelson - as she works on her dissertation, she allows herself to be carried away into LaTour's life and times, constructing out of the facts she knows a more complete picture of a human being, all the way down to his thoughts and motives. All of this is colored by the events of her own life. Her marriage of twelve years is slowly disintegrating - eroded by time and by inattentiveness (on the part of both herself and her husband). The novel follows them from early in their lives, before they meet - the reader is given invaluable glimpses into their pasts and upbringings, allowing the forces that have formed them to be visible. They are drawn together as inexorably as they fall apart.

Unlike many contrived plots wherein spitefulness and meanness - both unfortunately common human traits - play a large part in the path lives take, there is no hard-spirited ugliness at play here. This is simply a story of lives that come together and fall apart. There is a common thread passing through the fabric of all of these characters' lives, however - LaTour and Vivienne included - they are all running from something. Not all of them are conscious of it, but it's there. Suzanne and Jack are both running from the smothering influence of their parents - his are extremely wealthy, hers are from a rural area in the Appalachians. Elly, Suzanne's acquaintance who takes Jack as a lover, is running both from and to herself - streaming away from the life she has had and toward the life she imagines she wants, all of the time actually running away from who she really is. LaTour is running desperately from death - and Vivienne is running (at least in her dreams) from the life she leads in the rural French countryside. Everybody wants something they don't think they have - and a few of them actually come to discover that they had more than they realized all along.

It is these voyages of self-discovery and longing that make this book so appealing - and the fact that Huddle has combined all of these stories into a valid whole makes this an entertaining, compelling read.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MESMERIZING, February 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (Hardcover)

Gorgeous restraint and clairivoyant insight reside at the center of David Huddle's second (and finest) novel. How he is able to imagine and weave together the lives of an aging art history professor at the end of her marriage and a young girl entangled in a charged mental dance with a dying painter (La Tour) is nothing short of mesmerizing. I read this book in one sitting and sat stunned at the end.