Julia Glass
In 2002 the National Book Award for Fiction went to Julia Glass's debut novel, Three Junes. Glass, who was forty-six years old at the time, dedicated her award to late bloomers. She has gone on to publish a strong second novel, The Whole World Over (2006), which incorporates the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York into its complex plot, and a third book of fiction, I See You Everywhere (2008).
Julia Glass was born on 23 March 1956 in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of John and Florence McKerrow Glass. John Glass worked as an ethnohistorian of Meso-American peoples and as an executive of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America. Glass's mother was a master of foxhounds and a longtime president of the Lincoln, Massachusetts, Historical Society. Julia Glass and her sister, Carolyn, who was born in 1961, grew up primarily in Lincoln, where Julia was a child noted for her dedication to the library, reading avidly, a habit that continued into her later years as a day student at Concord Academy. The two sisters went in different academic directions: Carolyn Glass was a veterinarian until her death in 1992; Julia Glass was oriented from childhood toward the arts.
Originally, Glass pursued painting, graduating summa cum laude and Scholar of the House in studio art from Yale in 1978, after which she was awarded a John Courtney Murray travel fellowship from Yale and spent the next year in Paris. On her return to the United States, she painted and drew for the next ten years, supplementing that work with writing and freelance editing. She published in such journals as New York, Gourmet, More, Redbook, Glamour, Parenting, Parents, Lifetime, Allure, Time Out Kids, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Good Housekeeping, 7 Days, Woman's Day, and the on-line publication TheMan.com. Additionally, she published twenty-three feature-length book reviews in the "Books" section of the Chicago Tribune.
By the time Glass was in her thirties, she found herself focusing more on her writing than on her painting. At first, she says in a 2002 interview with Alden Mudge (Bookpage.com), she felt conflict as she found herself drifting away from the visual arts. She worried that perhaps her writing was something of an indulgence. Awards, however, began to accumulate: three Nelson Algren Fiction Awards (1993, 1996, 2000); the Tobias Wolff Award in 1999; the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella in 1999 (for "Collies," which became the first of the three parts of Three Junes); and the Ames Memorial Essay Award from Literal Latte in 2000. Glass and the art photographer Dennis Cowley have two sons, Alec and Oliver. After many years in the West Village in New York, the family moved in 2004 to the Boston suburbs.
Three Junes (2002) was written in the time Glass had free from her day jobs and child rearing. She said in the Mudge interview that she wrote the novel as a way of responding to life-altering pain, as a reflection on "heartbreak that we're never going to get over, heartbreak that will be stratified in our hearts forever" (Bookpage.com). It is a novel that directly confronts death and alienation, but it primarily celebrates the complexity and richness of life. The book's three-part structure is based on triptychs Glass studied in her years as a painter, with the middle section, "Upright," serving as the focal point of the novel, and "Collies" and "Boys" reflecting upon and from it. The epigraph, from Jim Harrison's Road Home (1998), states a theme that pervades this novel and the one to follow: "Assuming that our energies are sufficient, love is interminable."
Energies, however, are rarely sufficient. Glass often focuses on the perversions of the energies that support interminable love. Three Junes comes out of the desire to understand the strongest, deepest aspects of life and death, not just for one central character but for many characters, of such variety that the novel takes on a universality of approach and meaning. Glass examines many lives in a comprehensive, philosophical way; she also styles her exploration in exquisitely formed words and details, rich in specificity. It is a book that can be read thematically, for character, and for the beauty of its writing.
In Three Junes, Glass establishes several motifs and themes that recur in The Whole World Over: family, in particular, motherhood; birds (who fly the whole world over but come back home); the hard struggles of human life; the complexity of the demands people place upon one another; the solace of food; even the usefulness of Emily Dickinson. She does this in a graceful, confident voice. The Whole World Over is told through many viewpoints, primarily those of pastry chef Greenie Duquette; her husband, Alan Glazier, a couples therapist; her friend Walter Kinderman, a Bank Street restaurateur; and Saga, originally named Emily, a brain-damaged young woman sometimes driven to sleep on the streets of New York. Formerly a young woman with a career plan and a lover, Saga experiences the loss of both when a tree limb falls on her head. (Walter's own fear in this crowded city is of a falling piano; and accident is a major theme, foreshadowing the ultimate disaster of 9/11.) Glass has said that she intended in this novel to work with a happy, extroverted character; and Greenie is an energetic, early-morning singing baker who is rather strangely lured from her family, her business, and Glass's Bank Street universe to New Mexico, where she cooks for the governor in his mansion. The working title of the book, and the title of the first of its three parts, was "A Piece of Cake." At the beginning of the book Greenie is a woman frustrated in a marriage dominated by her husband's sagging career and midlife depression. She is not one, however, to linger over an unsatisfying situation, and she leaves Alan with the belief that she is not separating from him, but rather moving toward a resolution of a bad time in their marriage.
It is not all that easy -- not a piece of cake, certainly -- to interrupt a marriage or to separate a family, and Greenie's move to Santa Fe does both. The irony of Alan's flagging success as a couples therapist who is abandoned by his wife and four-year-old son, followed by the further irony that this man may have another young son of whom he has been unaware for some years, is nicely comedic yet treated with respect for the character. Alan is never a figure of ridicule; and as events progress, he becomes a man of stature, both professionally and personally, willing to go through the absurdity of human suffering to arrive at the self-awareness and acceptance that make his life livable again after a year of isolation followed by the resultant enlarging of his personal circle.
Saga, so passive as the novel begins that she allows herself to be grateful to a man who among other failings rapes her, clings to only one love after her accident: she adores the animals rescued by the splinter rescue group she serves. Saga, like Alan, undergoes sadness and personal alienation to emerge a fuller, more developed individual. She is dependent for much of the novel on her elderly uncle, Marsden, a retired professor who has taken her in following her accident and the deaths of both of her parents. When the uncle becomes infatuated with his oncoming grandparenthood and makes compromises that threaten Saga's sense of her place in the world, she gradually finds a new life in the city. Under the professor's tutelage, she has felt unable to handle such a transition. Befriended by Fenno McLeod at Plume, she finds the strength to separate herself from her uncle and live in the city again, working at the bookstore and engaging gently and gradually with the West Greenwich Village community.
Walter, like Fenno McLeod, is one of Glass's warmly drawn gay New York men. His restaurant is a major meeting place for the action of much of the novel, and his personal history and his generous acceptance of his young nephew, a trial to his own parents, make him at once engaging and pivotal to several of the plotlines of the novel. His importance becomes clear at the opening of the novel when he connects Greenie with the governor of New Mexico; it is at Walter's Place that the visiting governor eats a piece of her coconut cake. Walter, though in a hospitality business and a good friend and family member, is one of the lonely characters in this novel; his personal breakthrough comes when he feels enough confidence to have friends in for an evening at the restaurant, only to witness one of New York's biggest blizzards and experience a personal storm of his own, though it appears subtly and wittily just as the evening ends.
This early encounter between Clem and Louisa leads to what Louisa says near the end of the book is her most humiliating experience, a near drowning from which she is saved by her sister's voice and her calm. The irony comes thirteen years later, when Clem, always venturesome, always popular, always in control, can be saved by no one. The mystery of suicide is a major theme in the last parts of the book, foreshadowed by Clem's youthful transience and risk taking, her belief in the inevitability of biological determinism, her trips into deep waters. She leaves behind the incomprehensibility of suicide. Louisa, who as the sister does not receive the sympathy so obviously due their parents, is the artist and writer who cannot let go of the questions -- the why, the what happened, the how could no one know? Glass uses Clem's voice, in a note to a lover, to tell her last story; Louisa's voice tells the story of the death and its aftermath, detailing the complex method, showing the body, experiencing the helplessness. Complicating the horror, balancing it as another threat to comprehension and life itself, is Louisa's cancer. From a life that has been marked with good fortune, family and friends, artistic and scientific achievement, there is now sickness, fear, death, "Clemlessness." Louisa has suffered, too, during the divorce that preceded the sickness and death; as a woman of character, she has been shocked both by her own impatience with her polite and affable husband and by the animal force that pulls her into the affair that ends the marriage.
Increasingly alienated from her family -- her mother on one page addresses nine compliments to her husband before turning to Louisa, whose lovingly crafted anniversary plates she has stored in the barn -- Louisa finds strength and meaning in the world of art and friends, lovers, and ultimately a husband and stepchildren whose past includes trauma equal to her own and understanding equally hard won.
The artistry of this book lies in Glass's presentation of characters, whom she discovers in the joyous fullness of her earlier books. Clem's early insouciance; Aunt Lucy's exuberant "newfangling" of life in her nineties and her stoic acceptance of her past, in which she has yielded to family over self with singular grace and discretion; Beau Jardine's sweetness and his disciplined grief; Ray's tenderness as a lover who cannot give enough but gives more than anyone can expect; Clem's increasing torment over the lives of the wild creatures she tries to protect and sometimes can only hurt -- all these are masterfully developed in the rich language that is Glass's territory. There is mystery in each story and always a resolving irony, and there is humor -- expressed once in the exclamation "Trout!" There are some imperfections as well. It is sometimes mystifying how Clem's voice can be so clear and assured, how she can describe her alienation so well, when she keeps herself abstracted from everyone surrounding her. To accommodate the two voices, some explication is repeated, told in each sister's voice. Overall, however, the book presents the chaos and agony of life-threatening illness and suicide as honestly as can be done.