La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl [Hardcover]

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'm usually the first person to argue that a book can't 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 radience backwards. The funny thing is that this is exactly (at least to some extent) 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's 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 an aging woman's 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 isn't perfect. I couldn't really accept the 17th century narrative, even given the context of it being Suzanne's fantasy. Suzanne also suffers because she's unlikable for so much of the book.

Still, a good way to start off the New Year's reading.

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.