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THE STORY OF A MILLION YEARS

Name: THE STORY OF A MILLION YEARS
Author: David Huddle
ISBN: 0-395-96605-1

by David Huddle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 1999

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This tightly focused study of two marriages and its partners’ carefully guarded inner lives is the first full-length novel from the veteran poet and prose writer whose earlier fiction includes several story collections and the novella Tenorman (1995). Huddle tells the tale through the reminiscences of seven different narrators living at various times in a Cleveland suburb: the result is a kind of suburban midwestern, domestic Rashomon whose finest sequences offer disturbingly candid revelations of how even the most intimate and trusting relationships are fraught with misunderstanding and secrecy. Beautiful Marcy Bunkleman, for example, will never confess either to her parents or her husband the affair she conducted, when only 15, with her mother’s 40ish married friend Robert. Neither Marcy’s self-absorbed husband Allen (nicknamed “A.B.C.”) Crandall nor her best friend Uta will reveal that their friendship led them to a single (shabby) sexual episode—nor will Uta’s deferential “house-husband” Jimmy Rago (who’s also Allen’s old college buddy) let on that he’s guessed their secret, or attempt to act on his lifelong love for the amiable though indifferent Marcy. The emotional gyrations these four push themselves (and one another) through are cast into vivid relief in single sequences that are narrated, respectively, by the aging Robert, who even years afterward cannot come to terms with his feelings for Marcy and memories of his “seduction” of her; by Robert’s unhappy wife Suzanne, who understands her wayward husband’s psyche far better than she knows her own; and finally by Marcy’s adult daughter Suellen, whose climactic view of her mother alone (after Allen has left Marcy) hauntingly underscores the several ways these people have isolated, second-guessed, and, ultimately, both served and cheated themselves. An old story (comparisons to Updike and Cheever are inevitable), but Huddle makes it fresh by giving his characters vividly distinctive personalities—and the rueful honesty to see themselves as the flawed people they have somehow become.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-96605-1

Page Count: 244

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TENORMAN
by David Huddle

- BOOK REVIEW
INTIMATES
by David Huddle

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK IN VIETNAM
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

- BOOK REVIEW
STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

- IN THE NEWS
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- SEEN & HEARD
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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.