Customer Reviews

Story of a Million Years

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4 star:		(2)
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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.

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.

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.

With the possible exception of the first voice (chapter), I just could not care about these characters. Each voice sounded the same; their issues were supposed to be compelling but little of what they were angst-ing about seemed important. Some nice writing, certainly, but a lot of it is unbelievable and ultimately, it feels a small book. Maybe if it had been sold as a linked collection of stories? I'm not sorry I read the book, but I'm sorry I paid for it.

I made it all the way to page 70 before I threw the book down. Just having some interesting things happen doesn't make for an interesting story. Dull dialogue, no real differentiation among the voices. There was no way to really care about these characters.

If you believe in the art of storytelling by omission, coupled with luminous but unostentatious prose, Huddle, if you haven't come across him yet, could be your next great reading discovery. Best known for his short stories and poetry, but increasingly receiving greater regard as a novelist, Huddle's The Story of a Million Years is a masterful group portrait of two couples, their shared relationships, and the instances in which their individual lives echo in each other. Beginning with a secret affair between 15-year-old Marcy and the husband of her mother's friend, The Story of a Million Years moves effortlessly between various perspectives and moments, presenting a stunning, moving, classically relevant tale in which each character seeks to recapture a kernel of long-forgotten goodness.

This a very good book if you like to read about people's inner thoughts, interactions and reactions to the people they love and know. It is subtle in its prose, the characters are relatable, and flow of the characters points of view are perfect. This book will be in your mind even when you have stopped reading it.

This is one of those books that as you begin to read it, you realize you have found a jewel. An exceptionally well-written book that *stays* with you long after you have read the last page. A thinking person's book that has become one of the best books I have ever read.

First, I concur with those reviewers who find inadequate differentiation among the narrative voices here. But what unsettles me more is the absence of real-world consequences in a novel that seems to have been written in a realistic style.

In the first chapter, Robert, a forty-one year old friend (!) of the family lures fifteen year old (!) Marcy into months of sexual "commerce." The girl's parents never suspect? The man's wife never interfers? Statutory rape is how most states would prosecute this affair, but Robert gets off scot-free. How convenient! (For the author.)

Then in the third chapter, Boyce breaks Jimmy's jaw when the latter puts his moves on Uta. Assault and battery? A personal-injury lawsuit? No way! Not in this author's fictional world. Crime seems to pay, here at Huddle House.

Later we learn that Marcy's marriage to A.B.C. was based on deception. Then A.B.C. and Uta have a secret fling at HoJo's. (She's the one he really wanted.) (And Jimmy really wanted Marcy.) Deception, then more deception. U.Va.'s honor code apparently never "took" with these characters.

Near the end, Marcy cries for dead Robert, because as an adolescent, she couldn't love him. Does she never realize she was victimized? This kind of plot may give you a ripple of titillation, but for me this is a dreary, sleazy, greasy-spoon of a story. Mr. Huddle certainly can write, but if he keeps writing in this vein, will he ever produce the Great American Novel? Not in a million years.

This short (186 pages) novel is the debut effort by master short story writer and poet, David Huddle. He has been published regularly for over 20 years but because of format is not generally well known. Hopefully this book will help put him on the map. If it does get him a location there, it will be well deserved.

"the story..." is many stories combined to help tell the story of relationships. By expanding his efforts into novel format, Mr. Huddle has perhaps forced his writing to grow into areas he is less comfortable with then he has been able to in the past. His last short story collection "Intimates," though extremely well written, was difficult to read straight through as many of the characters in the individual stories were very similar to each other.

While the four main characters in the book have many similarities, they are also extremely varied, both individually and within their relationships. We're given Allen Ballston Crandell (known as A.B.C. through the bulk of the book), and his wife Marcy. We also have Jimmy Rago and his wife Uta. The two couples are brought together while at the University of Virginia and develop relationships independent of their primary couplings.

What Huddle does is go back and forth in time, bringing forth event after event, to show us how relationships begin, develop, transfer, unwind, and dissolve. He does this both with spoken and unspoken words. As the story develops and we go through more events, our understanding of each of the characters grows; we feel more understanding for their happiness, sadness, actions and lack thereof. We also get his by bits and pieces as the story advances that strike our earlier reactions to character moves or decisions as perhaps judgmental and unfair. I believe further readings of this novel would advance these understandings and reactions even further.

Huddle does nothing to draw attention to his writing; it is straightforward and spare. Instead he gives us character development in a subtle yet accelerated pace. He gives us characters to care about, relationships to worry about. His characters don't give speeches and the story isn't full of long diatribes about what life is, or relationships are. It is the story of how actions and secrets define us more than words. Of how secrets and silence and lack of actions push our relationships to their terms.