David Huddle
La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl

Harvard Info Center
The Holyoke Center, 1350 Mass Ave, Cambridge
Tickets are required and available for free at bookstore.

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.

Art history professor Suzanne Nelson escapes her failing marriage by retreating into the fertile world of her imagination. Here she invents La Tour's final painting sessions with a young model, a village girl. As the girl modestly disrobes for the artist, he discovers a thatch of wolf-like hair across her back, a marking she has never been aware of. In Suzanne's mind, this encounter becomes a story of truth and lies, art and identity, as Suzanne inserts herself into La Tour's world of color, light, and darkness.

Deftly moving from the present to the seventeenth century, Huddle reveals the surprising repercussions of La Tour's art in Suzanne's life. In the process he asks the biggest questions: How do we come to define who we are? Does art always tell the truth? What secrets must remain our own and which can we justify giving away? La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl is both passionate and fascinating.

If you get the New York Times Book Review this Sunday you will see a glowing review of La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl on page 7. The Times says, "Huddle skillfully counterpoints his three plots, and the result is a prismatic, gemlike structure, appropriate for the book's cold characters and hard truths...That La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl achieves such psychological and emotional depths is particularly striking because Huddle, whose earlier books include the novel The Story of a Million Years and the story collection Only the Little Bone is such a cerebral writer. His characters don't come to life in the conventional way, instead they are abstractions that seem to disintegrate and reconstruct midparagraph. They are, as La Tour says of his painting, 'light becoming flesh.' This unfinished quality is what makes them, in the end, so painfully human. Like light, they seem always on the verge of changing." I loved this book.

David Huddle will be appearing at the Harvard Information Center in the Holyoke Center, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, at 6:00. Tickets are available at the Harvard Book Store information desk.