The Story of a Million Years [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

David Huddle (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2000

The acclaimed poet and story writer David Huddle weaves a masterly portrait of two couples and their shared histories, desires, and secrets. Marcy, Allen, Uta, Jimmy -- each becomes the hero of his or her own story, as all mine the past for evidence of goodness. David Huddle moves with remarkable agility from the imagination of a precocious adolescent girl, to the fears of a man in midlife, to the longings of a wife whose reserve cloaks aching depths. Each of these convincing voices asks the questions central to all our lives: What stories are so important that you'd never reveal them to another person in a million years? How do secrets come to define us, for better or for worse? Honest, accomplished, and wonderfully subtle, THE STORY OF A MILLION YEARS portrays the basic human desire to love and be loved unconditionally.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

David Huddle's first novel is masterful and often stunning, so carefully written that the words shimmer with purpose and necessity. Essentially the tale of two couples who have known each other since they were all teenagers, The Story of a Million Years follows Marcy and Allen, Uta and Jimmy as they try to keep going through storms of nostalgia, grief, manic lust. The foursome have been together so long that they all know the same songs. Sometimes Uta dreams about Allen, and Jimmy has long been convinced he loves Marcy, but as time moves on, these hushed-up desires become smooth and polished, like stones. Moving back and forth through various points of view and instances, Huddle brilliantly captures the sense of marriage as a system of secrets, in which certain memories and infidelities are held close like shields, talismans that protect the self from being subsumed altogether by the structures we build around love, the houses we build to contain our impulses.

Like someone playing a song over and over again at different speeds, the author recapitulates key moments until they break apart. For Uta one such moment happens when she's in college, lost in Manhattan after her friends ditch her, wandering back to their apartment at dawn. She doesn't push the buzzer to wake her flaky friends. Instead she sleeps in the front hallway in a post-drunk bliss. Uta's attachment to this moment is beautifully rendered in her down-to-earth, Lutheran-raised, sad-hearted voice. She remembers vividly "the crazy little bit of goodness that came into me in the front hall when I was standing there all by myself with my finger about to press the doorbell, when I knew I was safe, and when I decided not to disturb the sleepers. That was the closest I'll ever come to knowing what it feels like to be one of the really decent saints, like Saint Francis, or Saint Teresa of Lisieux. It was the only time I've ever had that feeling."

Huddle leaves many things out of his story, and there are moments when it's difficult to believe that these are couples with kids, jobs, dogs. The author is not, however, concerned with the noise of that world, but rather with silences, with moments when two people who have known each other forever find themselves face to face, struck dumb by the sight of each other, rendered speechless by a face's sudden mystery. --Emily White --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Already an accomplished writer of short fiction (Tenorman, Intimates, etc.), Huddle applies his story-writing skills to this shimmering debut novel, which traces the protracted, subtle fallout of an affair between 15-year-old Marcy Bunkleman and 41-year-old Robert Gordon, the husband of her mother's best friend. As the book opens, an adult Marcy recalls the relationship years after it has ended, in a voice so clear, so sure of itself, that readers may be jarred when in the second chapter Marcy's point of view is abandoned for that of her husband, Allen Crandall, who knows nothing of the affairAor indeed, of much else concerning his wife. Subsequent chapters unfold like short stories or brief character sketches, with first-person narratives from the perspectives of other people linked to Marcy: Robert, his wife, the Crandalls' daughter, their best friends from college. Huddle effortlessly creates seven distinct voices, inhabiting each character convincingly and completely. Few of these people have any knowledge of Marcy's secret past, leaving them free to meditate on their own disappointing loves, but the affair nevertheless becomes a kind of powerful black hole, exerting its gravitational pull on everyone's perception of Marcy whether they realize it or not. The shifting viewpoints can make for a fractured, glancing narrativeAa significant death and a significant divorce both occur offstage, for instanceAbut the multiple voices also create surprising dimension and texture in a slender novel. Like a shattered mirror pieced painstakingly together, every shard captures a different angle. Huddle sets the narrative in Cleveland, where Marcy grows up, and in D. C., where she settles, but the setting is really incidental; the real action takes place internally. It is this inner terrain to which Huddle is most sensitive: the ways we reconcile or fail to reconcile ourselves to our moral lapses. His view of the human condition brims with wisdom, compassion and a rare grace. Agent, Bill Clegg. Author tour. (Sept.) FYI: The first chapter, "Past My Future," appeared in Best American Short Stories 1996.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (September 15, 2000)
• ISBN-10: 0618082336
• ASIN: B001KZHFV6
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #986,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging, entertaining & provocative web of stories., October 22, 1999

By 

George Lightcap (Highland Lakes, New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Story of a Million Years (Hardcover)

David Huddle's poems and short stories have been cherished reading for me for the past ten years. His novel lives up to my expectations. Huddle has a remarkable ability to create and capture his characters and bring them to life. His characters, male or female, are made real and believable. He creates believable lives and situations that allow me to look at life from a different perspective, perspectives that never fail to give me insight into my own life. I hope you will read this book; it is both a collection of short stories and an epic tale of a group of people you will grow to care about. David Huddle is one of America's greatest short story writers, and with this book he has made a significant contribution to the finest novels of the late Twentieth Century.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars About the Secrets and Subtleties of Marriage, July 15, 2000

By 

J. Mullin (Plantation, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Story of a Million Years (Hardcover)

This striking novel, relatively short (as one would expect from an accomplished short story writer attempting his first novel), is a carefully crafted book about secrets big and small, and their effect upon marital and family relationships. Huddle sounds like Updike, and also reminds me a bit of another author whose work I admire, John Casey (whose Half Life of Happiness also takes place in Charlottesville).

Huddle's characters are real, they jump off the page and remind you of people you know. The reader is a little uncomfortable at times being introduced to 15 year old Marcy and her affair with her mom's older friend, Robert. Equally unsettling is the scene years later when Robert, going through the motions during a poignant, unspectacular anniversary dinner with his wife, is plagued with guilt about the affair he had years earlier.

The novel chiefly concerns two couples, all of whom met as young adults at the University of Virginia. In writing about the interactions among these mostly sympathetic characters, Huddle strikes at the heart of several human emotions such as guilt, jealousy and pride with caring and honesty.

It is encouraging to read a novel about people we recognize, and to take a break from the wrestlers, million dollar lawyers and young wizards who inevitably reside in the bestellers list in recent times. The book is not perfect; the characters are a little sketchy at times, and the narration is not tremendously different even when changing narrators. Multiple narration is a delicate trick to pull off. However, both my wife and I enjoyed the book, and I have lent it to friends who were also pleasantly surprised when they were finished reading it. A definite thumbs up.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle, Powerful and Unforgettable, May 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Story of a Million Years (Paperback)

Whenever a short story writer I admire produces a novel, I cringe, remembering the legions of talented writers of shorter works who've tried longer forms and failed. So I approached this novel with some trepidation, hoping that this gifted short story writer wouldn't taint my high opinion of his previous work. I had no need to worry -- this novel is a gem.

If you like your novels plot rather than character-driven, you need to look elsewhere. However, if you're interested in a multi-layered exploration of how people live, think and relate, then this one's for you.

Suiting Huddle's background as a short story writer, the novel is structured around chapters with each one told from a different character's point of view. Each chapter reveals new insights about the other characters, and the speaker. By the end, the reader knows something of the secrets of each of them, and your understanding (and affection) for each deepens with every turn of the page. By the end, you know much of the interior lives of all of them, and you understand how their interactions and relationships are largely motivated by that part of their history that is unknowable to anyone, even those closest to them, and which will not and cannot be shared.

Huddle's writing is unobtrusive. It hints at more than it states, and it is magnificently uncluttered. No verbal pyrotechnics here -- just good writing where every word fits perfectly and does its job. It's the prose equivalent of a Shaker chair.

This book will keep you thinking -- about relationships, about the secrets you keep, and about the secrets kept by your spouse, your closest friends, and everyone else. It holds up well on repeated readings, and it will stay with you.