Dream a little Dreams

The art of David Huddle’s prose

By Sam Pfeifle

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl By David Huddle, Houghton Mifflin; 208 pages; $24.

David Huddle reads at the Stonecoast Writers Conference, at 7:30 p.m. at USM’s Stone House, in Freeport, July 26. Call (207) 780-5617.

PARALLEL PSYCHES: Huddle’s novel merges past, present, and telling fantasy.

As a novelist, David Huddle proves his considerable aptitude for crafting poems and short stories. Those talents, honed over his more-than-20-year writing career, combined to make an enjoyable novel out of his debut, 1999’s The Story of a Million Years, and have conspired to make his latest, La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl, an impressive literary novel of the most enjoyable sort. Like the best of our American authors with grand intentions — Fitzgerald, Morrison, Wallace — Huddle neglects neither the story nor the quality of his prose in mining the dynamic that all stories must wrestle with eventually: relationships.

This is nothing new for Huddle, who has made a name for himself as a close examiner of love and its bastard child, sex, with little moralizing and a great deal of introspection from his characters. In the past 10 years, Huddle has begun to puff out this examination, stretching beyond the short form in which he made his reputation to grander arcs that allow him to draw further parallels between the illogic of love and art versus the logic of life and science.

In 1995’s 96-page novella, Tenorman, what is ostensibly a story about an aging saxophone player becomes the tale of two couples deciding whether they’d like to stay together. The Story of a Million Years follows another two couples around the campus of the University of Virginia, and, again, remembrances of minor vignettes past — a night spent in the lobby of a building (Years), an afternoon spent rolling down the sides of grassy hills in adolescence (Tenorman) — do more to inform our understanding of Huddle’s characters than reams of pages spent by lesser writers explaining every nuance of a troubled childhood relationship with an overbearing parent.

Which is not to say that either of Huddle’s main characters in Dreams, ad executive Jack and art professor Suzanne, get along with their parents. Jack’s are rich and distant. Suzanne’s are poor and stupid. What’s delicious is that Jack is obnoxious and thoughtless and Suzanne is officious and condescending, and they sound and feel much like people you know very well. As Huddle feeds us scenes from their pasts — short stories, really — about shy boys jilted and young girls comforted only in hope of reward, it’s clear that the author is building a marriage of convenience that’s vulnerable to changing circumstances.

Then there is the ambitious back story Huddle creates through Suzanne’s daydreams about the artist she is studying, 17th-century painter Georges de la Tour. It’s brilliant. An old man barely able paint because of the pain of elderly limbs, la Tour is a bastard with a pack of menacing dogs, ruling over and terrorizing the French villagers who revere him for his talent. When he convinces one of them to donate his daughter for the purposes of modeling, it is initially just so he can stare at a beautiful naked girl for the better part of a day before sending her away. All is artifice. However, there is something about the “Wolf Girl” that intrigues la Tour, and the winding stories she tells while sitting for him encourage him to move his deadened arms and craft a final painting.

If la Tour and his model are too obviously a prop for understanding Jack and Suzanne, Huddle can be forgiven; it’s Suzanne’s daydream, after all, and if la Tour’s exquisite paintings of peasant life belie a distinct distaste for their pathetic peasant lives, it can only mirror the way “Suzanne can’t stand the way Jack plays to people.” And it allows for multiple readings: not only does la Tour stand as metaphor for Jack, but Suzanne’s construction of la Tour is informative as well. What the model discovers in herself, and her eventual mastery of la Tour, tell us all we need to know about Suzanne’s intentions toward Jack.

For his part, Jack constructs a reality rather than a fantasy. He cheats on Suzanne with a violinist named Elly (who happens to work for Suzanne) and obsesses over the quartet she plays in, projecting onto their craft a meaning for his own life. When he invites the quartet to use his and Suzanne’s home as a stand-in practice space, ostensibly as a casual fan, the dynamic between Elly, Suzanne (who knows, oh, she knows), and the rest of the players is more fraught with intrigue and suspense than any Robert Ludlum novel.

Watching these relationships devolve and involve, in different decades and centuries, against backdrops as divergent as hip Burlington, Vermont and the squalid Appalachia of Suzanne’s youth, is engaging enough to make La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl a one-sitting read. Huddle’s prose is effortless, showcasing a good poet’s knack for making every word important and a good storyteller’s knack for knowing that sometimes “She had no control.” works fine as a paragraph by itself.

There’s plenty here for the academic analyst and the beach reader alike. That’s rare. And if you happen to have spent any amount of time in Burlington, where you’ll recognize Halvorson’s and professor Magistrale, so much the better because Huddle’s world both is and isn’t what you remember. That’s fitting because Huddle’s novel both is and isn’t what you expect a great literary novel to be.

Sam Pfeifle, who was a student of David Huddle’s at the University of Vermont, can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com.