Customer Reviews

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl

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4 star:		(1)
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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!

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.

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.

I enjoyed this book very much but often felt like i was reading 2 novels. I failed to see how the 2 settings and stories, although told at a parrallel, intertwined or related. I enjoyed the Vivienne/La Tour story much more than the other and found it annoying to have read both. I was hoping the book was more in the line of Chevalier's Pearl Earring - but it was not. I am left feeling like, "ok, so....." with emptiness... i did not like the ending....

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.

As I was halfway through this book, I had a couple of thoughts.

One was that it falls squarely into one of my favorite categories (what a friend of mine jokingly calls "academics in love" novels.)

Another was that the book was going to be too slight to really be worth all the craftsmanship. On this thought, I turned out to have been very wrong.

I am usually the first person to argue that a book cannot be redeemed in its ending. I dislike it very much when an author pulls some kind of spectacular deus ex machina out at the conclusion and expects the reader to extend that resolution backwards. The funny thing is that this is what Huddle does, and for a change I found that it really worked.

The book begins as a beautifully written little story about a dry and isolated art history professor in a failing marriage who daydreams a story about George La Tour (a 17th century writer) instead of interacting with her painful life. The narrative weaves between her perspective, the perspective of her husband, and the perspective of a La Tour in his last years.

It is really kind of wonderful how without me noticing it, Huddle brings all the threads together to be about something much bigger and more important than self-involvement. The book ends up being about loss and acceptance and the way we understand other people and the way it treats the subject is even stronger because of the understated way it plays its hand.

La Tour is not perfect. I could not really accept the 17th century narrative, even given the context of it being Suzanne's fantasy. Suzanne is also difficult to like, at least for much of the book. A friend of mine who read it found it very difficult to get past the nature of her character to enjoy the book.

Still, a good way to start off the New Year's reading. Recommended for fans of strong literary criticism. Bonus for armchair art critics.

I am an art historian, so I approached this book with high expectations. However, I failed to see how the two stories - 1) 17th century France, George de la Tour and the young village girl, Vivienne, who became the model for his final painting and 2) present-day Art History professor, Suzanne, her husband, Jack, and his lover Elly - intertwined or illuminated one another. There were "back stories" of Suzanne and Jack, as well. Suzanne's revealed an unhappy, unengaged childhood in the rural South, where her intellect and talent were ignored and denigrated rather than encouraged. Jack's back story revealed an episode when he was a camp counselor who discovered a medical problem that was afflicting a camper. So? Neither of these tales was truly important to the story as a whole, and certainly were not needed in such depth. I felt as though the author was just grasping at filler, as the story was fairly short, even with these added bits. Further, the characters were not particulary appealing. They were all morally flawed.

I am sorry to say I would not recommend this.

An exquisite balance presides over the large world in this short novel from David Huddle. I'm not sure what that balance is or where it comes from, but I think it grows naturally out of Huddle's profound acceptance of particular human lives exactly as they are. The novel resonates with vulnerability and distinctive intelligence as it moves freely with Suzanne or her husband Jack through vivid episodes in Appalachia, a historical French village, and living rooms and bedrooms of Burlington, Vermont. Huddle's lyrical appreciation of human movement and the subtleties of the most intimate decisions bring surprise to every episode of the novel. The ending is among the most moving in any book I've ever read. I highly recommend this book--to be read the first time in one sitting if possible.