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.


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.


From Booklist
*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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Novels about painters are common, yet uncommonly good is Huddle's revivification of Georges De La Tour, the seventeenth-century master of candlelit mysteries with scenes of dramatic but serene grace. The mildly fictionalized La Tour forms half of a diptych; the book tells another story, too, of art historian Suzanne Nelson and the tumult of her twenty-first-century life. Suzanne engages us from the start. She's a misfit intellectual from backwoods Virginia who experiences an epiphany in her youth when she befriends a boy ridiculed as "The Mute." Identifying with the alienated, the strange, the castoff, she matures into a scholar enraptured by La Tour, whose transcendent talent was undercut by a cruel, perverse and overbearing character. The novel draws parallels between painter and student. Both have hidden lives; both carry secrets. La Tour is fixated on a model: a naive beauty whose loveliness is oddly heightened by a patch of wolflike hair on her shoulder. In some ways, Suzanne herself is that Wolf Girl, devouring history in search of a mythic version of herself. —Paul Evans

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. (Feb. 8) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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. (Feb. 8) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal