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


Book Description
In this absorbing novel, the award-winning author 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. 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. Deftly moving between the present and the seventeenth century, Huddle reveals the surprising repercussions of history and art in modern life. In the process he asks the biggest questions: How do we come to define who we are? Which secrets must remain our own and which can we justify giving away? LA TOUR DREAMS OF THE WOLF GIRL is both passionate and fascinating, a wonder of narrative invention and emotional depth.


About the Author
David Huddle's fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, Story, the New York Times Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories. Among his books of short fiction are Tenorman, Intimates, and Only the Little Bone. The recipient of two NEA fellowships, he teaches writing at the University of Vermont and is on the Faculty of the Board Loaf School of English. The author currently resides in Burlington, Vermont.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
IPROFESSOR NELSON can"t get free of Stevens Creek, Virginia. Nine miles west of the Blue Ridge Parkway, marked on only the most detailed maps, it"s a cluster of maybe a hundred houses, a store, and two filling stations. During her childhood, the hamlet had two or three times as many of its young men serving time in the penitentiary as it had students attending college. Hostility was part of its weather, but she was never that way. Quiet though she was, Suzanne always wanted to be close to somebody. Her two older sisters, Bonnie and Gail, turned cold toward her when they were little, though Suzanne still tries to be companionable to them. On their birthdays, she sends her sisters cards, but they forget hers every year. At Christmas she buys gifts for them and their kids, knowing that she will receive neither gifts nor thank-you notes. Her parents are friendly, but in a superficial way. They"re guarded in their dealings with her; when Suzanne calls them to chat, she senses how they maneuver to end the conversation. The estrangements hurt Suzanne. Distant as her life is from theirs, she"s done nothing to warrant her sisters" unfriendliness, nor has she ever given her parents cause to be wary of her. How could she help being the freak of the family? She didn"t realize that she was smarter -- a lot smarter -- than her sisters and her parents until she was in eighth grade. That"s when she had to ride the school bus thirty-five miles a day, to and from the consolidated high school. The teachers there who"d taught Bonnie and Gail were so stunned by Suzanne"s ability that they told her, compared with her sisters, she was a genius. Compared with most of the children who rode the bus in from Stevens Creek to Galax, Suzanne was a female Einstein. Of course she"s the only one in her family who doesn"t have that mountain accent -- her intuition obliterated it, starting with her first day of eighth grade. People in Galax spoke a more sophisticated version of Appalachian English than did people in Stevens Creek. The way the town kids mocked the country kids was so ruthless that most of Suzanne"s Stevens Creek school-bus acquaintances became predictably hostile and all the more determined to hold on to their mother tongue. Suzanne was the only one who began adapting. It was a talent she had -- listening, analyzing, imitating. By her sophomore year, the only ones mocking her way of speaking were a few of the more surly Stevens Creek kids, who took her Galaxized speech as a sign of betrayal. Mostly, though, the Stevens Creek kids thought of her as the one who could compete in that school, the one who had a chance of beating the Galax snobs at their own game. Nowadays Suzanne is pretty certain that the reason she changed her speech was to make friends among the smart kids. It didn"t work. She was popular. Again and again she found herself in groups of Galax girls; she was invited to spend the night at this girl"s house and that one"s. She made an effort to cultivate the friendship of several girls she admired, but intimacy never developed. She came to see how jokes and manners and the slangy small talk of the day were actually ways of pushing people away. Stevens Creek boys didn"t ask her out because she was too smart; Galax boys didn"t ask her out because she lived eighteen miles away. Her remembrance of that time in her life is like a nightmare, with her frantically running toward a familiar boy or girl who smiled and beckoned but who then was sucked backward through space, so that no matter how tirelessly she ran, she could never close the distance. There was, however, the Mute. The Limeberrys, his family, had lived on the outskirts of Stevens Creek for as long as anybody could remember. But the Mute had a foreign look -- dark skin, converging eyebrows, a beak-like nose, eyes with whites that caught your attention. The Mute could speak, but there was a nasal harshness to his voice -- it sounded as if his words were squeezing through some weird tube behind his nose. From his first day in first grade, he"d been brutally teased. By fourth grade, he"d shut up. He shook his head when his teachers called on him. He"d do that, shake his head yes or no, if you politely asked him a yes-or-no question. He did his homework, all of it printed neatly. When he absolutely had to communicate with a teacher, he"d print a quick note and carry it to the teacher"s desk. The Mute also learned to fight well enough -- that is, he could exact enough pain -- to convince the school bullies to lay off him. Thus, he became a completely isolated boy. In his classes and on the playground, in the cafeteria and the hallways, he moved among the children, but no one spoke with him. No one, as his teachers and the school administrators put it, interacted with him. He wasn"t antisocial, as far as anyone knew; he just didn"t carry out spoken intercourse with anyone. The Mute made himself almost invisible. What took place between Suzanne and the Mute seemed, at the time, just something that happened. In retrospect she thinks it may have been the most significant moment in her five years at Blue Ridge High School. That first August morning of eighth grade, when she got on the school bus behind Bonnie and Gail -- of course they"d pushed ahead of her -- there was no place to sit. She couldn"t know it then, but for a Stevens Creek kid, the most brutal politics of high school life had to do with where you sat on the school bus. So there she was, standing at the front, one step past the driver, looking down the aisle all the way to the back, and there was no place for her. There were several empty spaces, but each was a window seat being saved by the kid sitting on the aisle. Among all the faces staring at her, there wasn"t a friendly one. Bonnie and Gail each had a pal who"d saved a seat; now they sat staring at her, too, with that gleeful look Suzanne recognized as pure sibling vengefulness. She felt her face reddening. She was twelve years old and probably the youngest kid on the whole bus. She had on her new first-day-of-school dress, and she didn"t think there was anything wrong with how she looked, but there was no way she could make somebody give her a seat. She glanced over her shoulder. The bus driver was waiting for her, watching in his mirror to be sure she was seated before he started the bus moving. Twenty-some pairs of eyes blazed at her. She was about to open her mouth to let out what she knew would be a yelp, a wail, a shriek, a moan. That was when the Mute scooted over and gave her a place. When she had settled into the seat, she murmured, "Thank you, Elijah." She didn"t say what any other kid would have said: "Thanks, Mute." She was taking a chance, saying his whole name instead of the nickname Lige, which she somehow knew he wanted to be called. From far back in school, when he was still willing to speak, she must have remembered his telling someone that was his name. Since first grade, they"d been in the same classroom. She remembered a whole catalogue of humiliations he had suffered from their schoolmates over the years. She"d never spoken cruelly to him or done him any harm, but she"d never tried to help or defend him, either. She was his witness. That was what she meant to convey by using his full and proper first name -- that and her extreme gratitude, which "Lige" would not have signaled. "Lige" was merely "Thanks," whereas "Elijah" was "Oh, my dear schoolmate, I can never adequately thank you for the noble gesture you just made in that most painful moment of my twelve years of life." And her gratitude was only slightly diminished by her suspicion that he had taken the seat-saving aisle position to avoid the shame of having every bus rider turn down the open seat beside him. She thought about Elijah while she sat beside him for the long ride to Blue Ridge High School. What kind of parents named their child Elijah? Well, she knew what kind. Religious. And she thought about Elijah"s last name: Limeberry. She couldn"t imagine how anyone ever got to be named Limeberry, and in her concentration on such matters as his family and his name and the history of suffering that had produced his silence, Suzanne received -- as if it were a divine revelation -- a blast of empathy. She could feel exactly what it was -- even down to the thuds of his heartbeat, his breathing, his body odor, his flat butt on the vinyl seat, and his dozens of unspoken remarks -- to be Elijah Limeberry. The transmission of that boy"s life into her life lasted no more than about fifteen seconds, but it gave Suzanne a brief spasm of shivers. So for the five years until they graduated they rode the school bus together each morning. In the afternoon, Suzanne got out of sixth period with enough time to make it onto the bus and claim her own seat. If she"d chosen to sit with Elijah, or if he"d chosen to sit with her for the second time in a single day, they"d have been accused of being "in love." She understood the absurdity -- and maybe even the kindness of it. The bus kids allowed them the morning ride together because it was necessary -- it was what they had to do to survive -- and every kid riding with them understood that. But they wouldn"t tolerate Suzanne and Elijah openly choosing each other"s company. So now, when she got on the bus, Elijah automatically scooted over to the window seat to make room. He"d always sit over there, curled away from her and everyone else, and that gave him a little pocket of privacy. He did something with his notebook while he sat there. Suzanne didn"t make much of that -- most kids did their homework on the bus. For a lot of them it was the only time they ever did homework. Suzanne herself always read on the bus, though it was usually a book that didn"t have anything to do with her classes. She read, and he did whatever he did. That was how it was, because within a few weeks after that first morning, they had settled into an unsentimental acknowledgment of their arrangement. She even found herself occasionally slipping back into thinking of him not as Lige or Elijah, but as what he was called by everyone else on that bus -- the Mute. And Elijah had gone back to meeting her eyes only for the small moment each morning when she got on the bus and he scooted over. There were no further exchanges. But that morning on the bus, for whatever reason, she happened to glance his way. At the time it seemed a coincidence; she didn"t mean to look at his notebook, and he didn"t mean to reveal it. What she saw astonished her; he"d drawn a boy struggling with a monster before a crowd of faces. In her momentary view of the picture, Suzanne saw that the struggling boy was Elijah and that her face was at the front of the crowd. He"d even drawn her fingers touching her mouth to suggest concern and horror. The other faces were fixed in demonic grins. The monster, however, was the dominant image: many-eyed and many-handed, a dark mass of slime that evidently could wrap itself around the boy, take hold of his arms, legs, neck, and torso, envelope him in utter shadow. Quite clearly, the monster would prevail in their struggle. And the boy"s -- Elijah"s -- face held an expression of noble determination. One fist was poised for a blow toward a pair of the monster"s eyes. The other hand pushed away a grasping set of dark fingers. But anyone could see that the fight couldn"t last more than an instant or two. Elijah was about to be consumed by the slimy darkness. He caught her staring at the picture. Their eyes met and held for a few uncomfortable moments, as if he"d caught her secretly trying to hurt him. But of course she hadn"t been doing that. Even now, Suzanne can"t think of the word for what passed between them in that look, though it was something like a contract. He agreed to let her know that drawing pictures was what he did, and she agreed not to talk about it with anyone. Well, of course there were no words to the understanding, but that had to be it, because she never did tell anyone, and Elijah did allow her, from time to time, to see his pictures. What she really wanted was to watch him draw, but he never did so in front of her. He might add a little touch of shading if she was looking. When he was really concentrating, he turned away and curled over the notebook, as if he created the drawing within a secret cavity of his body. He worked with a blue pen and a black pen, and sometimes, when his shoulders made a certain movement, Suzanne was pretty certain he was switching from one pen to the other. When Suzanne recalls their unspoken agreement, she realizes that if Elijah revealed a drawing to her, he did so in a way that would prevent any other kid from seeing it. And she was unobtrusive in her looking. Actually, in the hundreds of mornings they rode the bus together, he probably showed her only a dozen pictures. And when he did, the two of them shielded the picture from the sight of the kids around them. What amazes her is that as intricate as the arrangement was, she gave little thought to it once she stepped off the school bus. Perhaps in the mornings, as she stood by the road waiting for the bus, she wondered what bizarre vision Elijah might show her that day. But during her school hours, and while she was at home, there was no place in her thoughts for Elijah "Lige" Limeberry, a.k.a. the Mute. It was as if she stashed him away in a special compartment of her mind. That remembrance disturbs her now. What is it about those long-ago days that nags at her? At first she can"t grasp it, but as she pushes her memory of Elijah, it begins to take hold. His pictures have lingered in her mind. They are there -- is that right? Even now, she holds vivid images that she knows were drawn by Elijah"s hand. Except that isn"t right, either, because several of the black and blue images in her mind were not drawn by Elijah. She herself made them up. Suzanne begins to see certain parts of her daily life in terms of Elijah"s pictures. Or she remembers pieces of her experience as if Elijah had drawn them. One day at lunch, there was a fight between two Galax boys, football players, in which the one ripped the other"s shirt, and the other screamed foul names and brandished a cafeteria chair. Suzanne saw the fight, and she knows Elijah didn"t -- because unless the weather was freezing cold, he always took his brown bag outdoors to eat by himself. But she remembers that fight as if Elijah had drawn it, the fighters looming, huge and furious, one boy"s veins popping in his neck as he stood cursing the other. Elijah would have shown the faces in the background -- maybe one of them hers -- and he would have shown the vice-principal pushing his way through the crowd to stop the fight and take the boys to the office, even though that didn"t really happen. The only pictures Elijah showed Suzanne were related to school. He drew one that is as clear in her memory as if it were a painting she had studied and written about. It was of Mrs. Childress, the librarian, drawn mostly in blue. She is a miniature human being in comparison with the great oafs, drawn in heavy black lines, who surround her in the library. Elijah had perfectly captured the woman"s precarious authority over them all. He"d invested her with blue beneath black lines so that the blueness is like energy held within her. As if even in her smallness, the librarian is the finished human being, whereas the students are the doofus creatures who don"t know what to do with themselves and depend on petite Mrs. Childress to bring a moment of focus to their lives. The boy drawn at the front of the line was famous for his unruly behavior in school, a boy who defied teachers and administrators but who was known to revere Mrs. Childress. Suzanne is sure that only she and Elijah ever noted the unacknowledged stature of that woman in the school, which she -- Suzanne -- wouldn"t have known how to describe. But once Elijah had set it into a picture and allowed her to see it, she could grasp what she already knew. There was a stretch during her senior year, however, when Elijah showed her no pictures and when he seemed not to notice her at all. The place beside him was available each morning; he no longer sat on the aisle side, pretending to save it, because by then it had been established that the place was hers. Also, he"d stopped catching her eye at any time during the bus ride or the school day. In the general chaos of her life in those days, however, the change in Elijah"s behavior was barely noticeable. Occasionally Suzanne wondered whether she"d done something to anger him or hurt his feelings, but nothing came to mind. And other matters demanded her attention. She"d got caught up in applying to colleges and discussing scholarships with her guidance counselors and teachers. One cold January day when she got on the school bus, she found the seat empty, Elijah not there. Everyone on the bus seemed to be staring at her. Elijah had never missed school. Something made Suzanne glance back at the bus driver. His eyes were on her, too, in the mirror that let him monitor what went on behind him. "His mother died," the driver said quietly. "She"d been sick a long time." Suzanne nodded but said nothing. She took her seat, and the bus driver let the clutch out and started the bus. She didn"t dare scoot over to the window; even with Elijah not there, it would have been wrong to take his place. She sat with her book bag in her lap, as she did every morning when he sat beside her. The more she thought about him, the more her face burned with shame. That his mother had died was horrible. If she"d been a friend to Elijah as he"d been to her that first morning, she"d have found out why he"d been holding himself away from her all that time. Or she"d have just known -- she who had once experienced what it was like to be Elijah! Everybody else on the bus -- though no one said a thing -- seemed to have known. All that time he"d been sitting beside Suzanne, he"d needed her to know his mother was ill, but she"d been thinking of herself and her future and the days of freedom that lay ahead of her at college. As she noticed how quiet the other kids were, she realized that tears were falling down her cheeks and splashing onto her book bag. Embarrassed, she turned toward the window and curled around herself, as Elijah did when he worked in his notebook. And it happened to her again, that sharp blast of empathy, which was like a magic trick in which she lived in Elijah"s body and mind for about twenty seconds. It made her face burn all the more. Throughout that day in school and the ride home and in her dealings with her parents and her sisters -- all of them leaving her completely alone, now that they knew she was making her escape to college within the year -- she was preoccupied. Before her mother called her down for dinner, she sat in her room, trying to draw a picture that would show her embracing Elijah to comfort him in his grief. But she had no talent for drawing, and even if she could have drawn what she meant, the picture would have been wrong. She had no desire to embrace him -- she simply wanted to let him know that she felt his sorrow, that she was somehow with him in his sorrow, or that she wanted to be with him. The more she studied her feeble attempt at a picture, the more confused she became about what she wanted to convey to Elijah. However, as she ate with her family -- who mostly talked among themselves as if she weren"t there -- she reconciled herself to writing him a note. When she finished washing the dishes -- the chore that had fallen to her when she was twelve by agreement among the family -- she went upstairs to compose her note to him. She paced her room, she did some of her homework, she read in the library book Mrs. Childress had recommended, and she composed draft after draft of her note of condolence. No matter what she wrote, she hated the words, so she finally settled on writing the thing she hated the least, which, as it turned out, was the most impersonal version of what she wanted to say.Dear Elijah,I am so sorry about your mother. Please forgive me for not having spoken to you about her before this. I know this must be a terrible time for you, and I hope you will let me know if there is anything I can do to help make things easier for you.Your school bus friend,Suzanne She had the note ready to give him the next day, but he wasn"t on the bus. That was a Friday, and the funeral -- she learned from the biweekly county newspaper -- would be on Saturday. She considered attending -- she could walk to the church -- but decided it would be a mistake to make a statement like that to her family and the townspeople. She was pretty certain he would be on the bus on Monday morning, when she could discreetly pass him the note. All through the weekend, she agonized, but she always came up with the same answer: she couldn"t pretend she didn"t know what had happened, she couldn"t draw a picture for him, and she couldn"t speak to him; she had to give him the words she had written. Monday morning Elijah was back in his seat, looking out the window. When Suzanne sat down, he didn"t move. The note, in its envelope, was tucked into an outside compartment of her book bag; she"d planned exactly how to pass it to him. She waited through the next two stops, until Leonard Branscomb stepped up into the bus. Leonard was a tall, red-faced farm boy who always had funny things to say to his pals in the back of the bus. Suzanne waited until he was directly beside her, carrying on as usual and distracting everyone as he made his way to the back. That was when she said, quietly but definitely, "Elijah," a few inches from his ear. She witnessed the little jolt she"d caused him. When he turned his eyes to her, she pushed the envelope against his hand, positioned so that he could see his name on it. He took it and once more gave her a look, one that struck Suzanne as fearful. Why should he be afraid of me? she thought as he faced the window again, curling around himself in that way of his. Relieved, she excused herself from worrying any further about him or what he would make of what she had written. She opened her library book and, her eyes on the page, began savoring a vision of herself walking across a campus in springtime -- Radford College or maybe V.P.I. She would be wearing new clothes; she would be in the company of a boy or a friend; she would have the admiration of her professors . . . She heard her name in a belch of sound, as if croaked by a whale or a porpoise trained to imitate human noises, and found herself staring straight at Elijah"s tear-streaked face. He grasped her hand, tugging it and holding on to it. He uttered two more syllables -- "Thank you" -- as if he were talking through his nose, yet loud enough for the kids near them to hear. The whites of his eyes gleamed weirdly. Then, perhaps sensing that she was repulsed by his behavior, he released her hand and jerked himself back toward the window, raising the hand that had grasped hers to wipe his wet cheeks and eyes. What she had to do was -- she knew it as clearly as if it had appeared before her in letters of fire -- TOUCH HIm. But what she really wanted more than anything was to move away, put some distance between his flesh and hers. Of course there was no other seat, and she probably wouldn"t have moved even if there had been one. But she couldn"t will herself to put a hand on his arm or shoulder or knee, couldn"t force even a whispered I"m sorry. All she could do was sit, locked in her sitting-on-the-bus posture. The moment passed. She sensed that if she so much as brushed him with her fingers, he"d strike at her in anger. Her face blazed with shame. She heard noise behind her and across the aisle -- stifled laughter. She guessed the kids sitting there -- Becky Stoots and Mildred Coleman -- were talking about what they"d just seen happen between her and Elijah. She could turn toward them and give them a look, but that would make things worse. So she sat quietly, hoping he would understand that she meant to endure the humiliation with him. But she knew he wouldn"t see it that way. He"d see it correctly: she"d betrayed him. She"d written and delivered that note to make herself feel better. And when he"d responded openly, she"d pulled away from him. So if it was possible to make Elijah Limeberry"s life worse -- the life of a friendless boy who"d been brutally mocked from his first day of school and whose mother had just died -- that was what she"d done. That was how she"d repaid his kindness in rescuing her on her first day of riding the bus.Suzanne knows this episode is at the core of what she protects from acquaintances who want to know where she came from and what it was like to grow up in Appalachia. But this isn"t all. There are probably forty or fifty old betrayals and humiliations from those days that radiate around that single moment on the bus with the Mute. Suzanne can evoke an amalgamation of smells that come from that bus, from the Colemans and Stootses and Branscombs and Mabes and Davises who got on at this stop and that one. Some of those children were clean, but few bathed regularly, and their clothes were rarely washed. One or two had the fragrance of fried side meat clinging to them. The Porter children came straight to the bus from milking cows and slopping hogs. She can probably even bring back the exact fragrance of Mildred Coleman"s hair spray after she"d been caught in the rain -- the memory of that scent oddly thrills Suzanne when it returns to her. From her hundreds of mornings and afternoons on the school bus, she can bring back snapped bra straps and cruelly flipped ears and ripped shirts and thrown condoms and tampons and curses and names called and blows struck and even the time Leonard Branscomb spat in the face of Buntsy Russell and dared him to do something about it. And there was Botch Arnold pulling a sharpened beer-can opener from his sock and threatening Trenton Mabe with it; that memory is such a squalid little treasure that Suzanne knows she will never let it go. Though she has devoted most of her life to putting them behind her -- to denying them -- these people remain an essential part of who she is. It isn"t so much the squalor or ignorance or ugliness of her former life that Suzanne wants to conceal. She knows she"s locked in this -- how to name it? -- posture of half-hearted empathy. All she had to do was despise Elijah Limeberry, the way everyone else did. He"d have understood, and she"d have caused him no pain. All she has to do now to separate herself -- cleanly and completely -- from her past is to despise it. But she can"t. He paid her back. When she remembers it, she grimaces. Whether or not payback was all he intended, Suzanne will never know. It was on one of her last days of school, when she was still giddy from the offer of a full scholarship from Hollins College. She"d applied there only to appease the English teacher, who was the most passionate of those urging her to get a college education. The scholarship stopped her parents" resistance to her going. They could no longer say they weren"t about to pay good money for her to go off to some fancy college just to come back home and turn up her nose at them. That spring, her senior year in high school, she was strolling down a grand boulevard of possibility and opportunity. The episode of her treachery to Elijah was fading from memory, and she had only a few more days of riding the school bus before leaving it forever. She and Elijah had continued to share a seat, but they both understood it was for the sake of deflecting attention from them. If she"d sat elsewhere, their bus comrades would have teased them without mercy. So when she took her seat those last mornings, Suzanne endured the discomfort she felt emanating from Elijah, as she supposes he endured whatever feelings were coming from her -- though it troubles her to name what they were. She tells herself, Sorrow -- I felt sorry for what had happened between us -- but the truth is that she loathed him. Now that she had betrayed Elijah, what she had to bear, while sitting beside him, was loathing of such intensity that she must have reeked of it, like the smell of cow manure that came onto the bus with the Porter kids. The grimace that comes to Suzanne"s face now -- twenty-two years after the fact -- is focused on her discomfort with that feeling. Not that she thinks loathing is an unacceptable feeling, but that she felt it for a boy in whose body and mind she actually lived for about thirty-five seconds. And for a boy whose kindness had saved her in a desperate moment. The Mute left an envelope, with her name on it, stuck in her locker door on the last day of school. He must have been paying close attention to her and planning carefully, because it was the last time she"d ever open that locker. And she wasn"t going to ride the bus home that afternoon, because she"d been invited to spend the night with a classmate who was also going to Hollins in the fall and who said she wanted to get to know Suzanne a little better. When Suzanne saw the envelope, she knew immediately who"d put it there -- it was exactly like the envelope she"d passed to him on the bus, except that it had SUZANNE printed on it in black ink. She dreaded reading the note so much that she carried it into the girls" bathroom, and though there wasn"t a soul there, at the end of the school day, she took the envelope into a stall before opening it. It was a folded card of good stationery -- the same as she"d used for her note to him -- and when she unfolded it, she found the inside entirely inked over. While Suzanne stood in the shadowy little box with the toilet -- and the smell of the girls" bathroom making her feel slightly nauseated -- she saw that there was blue ink beneath the nearly solid blackness. The black pen strokes had just enough space between them for a vague blue shape to be discernible. She left the stall and carried the note to the window to study it in bright light. And still she couldn"t make it out. There was something back there; she thought it was a face, but she couldn"t be sure. The no-image image nagged her to study it more carefully -- she thought about looking at it at home with a magnifying glass. But as she stood by the window, holding the card, something began to anger her. Something sparked in her. She ripped it! Then she ripped the two pieces into four. Those two rippings happened in an instant, and she stood holding the quartered parts. Finally, she took them, with the envelope, to the big trash can, where she tore the pieces into the size of snowflakes. As she let them fall into the can, she took special care that the SUZANNE on the envelope was so thoroughly shredded that not even a genius of a puzzle worker could have reassembled it. That was perhaps the first time Suzanne had deliberately destroyed something. Leaving the restroom and walking out of the school building toward the parking lot to meet her classmate, she was shocked by her exhilaration. Her hands still tingled from the ripping. That was good, she thought. That was just fine, Suzanne decided as she hurried toward the girl who wanted to know her better.Copyright © 2002 by David Huddle

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