The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

Overview

Julia Glass, author of the award-winning novel Three Junes, tells a vivid tale of longing and loss, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important connections to others. In The Whole World Over, she pays tribute once again to the extraordinary complexities of love.Greenie Duquette lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her young son. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. At Walter’s restaurant, the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts–heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision, along with events beyond Greenie’s control, will change the course of several lives around her.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375424380
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/23/2006
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	751,945
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Julia Glass was awarded the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction for Three Junes. A fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for 2004-2005, she has also been the recipient of a 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowhship in fiction writing and has won several prizes for her short stories, including three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award. Glass, a former New Yorker, now lives in Massachusetts with her family.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

March 23, 1956

Place of Birth:

Boston, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Yale College, 1978; Scholar of the House in Art, Summa Cum Laude, 1978

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: A Piece of Cake The call came on the twenty-ninth of february: the one day in four years when, according to antiquated custom, women may openly choose their partners without shame. As Greenie checked her e-mail at work that morning, a small pink box popped up on the screen: Carpe diem, ladies! Scotland, according to her cheery, avuncular service provider, passed a law in 1288 that if a man refused a woman’s proposal on this day, he must pay a fine: anything from a kiss to money that would buy her a silk dress or a fancy pair of gloves. If I weren’t hitched already, thought Greenie, I would gladly take rejection in exchange for a lovely silk dress. Oh for the quiet, sumptuous ease of a silk dress; oh for the weather in which to wear it! Yet again it was sleeting. Greenie felt as if it had been sleeting for a week. The sidewalks of Bank Street, tricky enough in their skewed antiquity, were now glazed with ice, so that walking George to school had become a chore of matronly scolding and pleading: “Walk, honey. Please walk. What did I say, did I say WALK?” Like most four-year-old boys, George left his house like a pebble from a slingshot, careening off parked cars, brownstone gates, fences placed to protect young trees (apparently not just from urinating dogs), and pedestrians prickly from too little coffee or too much workaday dread. Greenie was just shaking off the ill effects of what she called VD whiplash: VD as in Valentine’s Day, an occasion that filled her with necessary inspiration as January waned, yet left her in its wake—if business was good—vowing she would never, ever again bake anything shaped like a heart or a cherub or put so much as a drop of carmine dye in a bowl of buttercream icing. As if to confirm her fleeting disenchantment with all that stood for romantic love, she and Alan had had another of the fruitless, bitter face-offs Greenie could never seem to avoid—and which, in their small apartment, she feared would awaken and worry George. This one had kept her up till two in the morning. She hadn’t bothered to go to bed, since Tuesday was one of the days on which she rose before dawn to bake brioche, scones, cinnamon rolls, and—Tuesdays only—a coffee cake rich with cardamom, orange zest, and grated gingerroot: a cunningly savory sweet that left her work kitchen smelling like a fine Indian restaurant, a brief invigorating change from the happily married scents of butter, vanilla, and sugar (the fragrance, to Greenie, of ordinary life). Dead on her feet by ten in the morning, she had forgotten the telephone message she’d played back the evening before: “Greenie dear, I believe you’ll be getting a call from a VIP tomorrow; I won’t say who and I won’t say why, but I want it on the record that it was I who told him what a genius you are. Though I’ve just now realized that he may spirit you away! Idiot me, what was I thinking! So call me, you have to promise you’ll call me the minute you hear from the guy. Bya!” Pure Walter: irritating, affectionate, magnanimous, coy. “Vee Aye Pee,” he intoned breathlessly, as if she were about to get a call from the Pope. More likely some upstate apple grower who’d tasted her pie and was trolling for recipes to include in one of those springbound charity cookbooks that made their way quickly to yard sales and thrift shops. Or maybe this: the Director of Cheesecake from Junior’s had tasted hers—a thousandfold superior to theirs—and wanted to give her a better-paid but deadly monotonous job in some big seedy kitchen down in Brooklyn. What, in Walter’s cozy world, constituted a VIP? Walter was the owner and gadabout host (not the chef; he couldn’t have washed a head of lettuce to save his life) of a retro-American tavern that served high-cholesterol, high-on-the-food-chain meals with patriarchal hubris. Aptly if immodestly named, Walter’s Place felt like a living room turned pub. On the ground floor of a brownstone down the street from Greenie’s apartment, it featured two fireplaces, blue-checked tablecloths, a fashionably weary velvet sofa, and (Board of Health be damned) a roving bulldog named The Bruce. (As in Robert the Bruce? Greenie had wondered but never asked; more likely the dog was named after some fetching young porn star, object of Walter’s cheerfully futile longing. He’d never been too explicit about such longings, but he made allusions.) Greenie wasn’t wild about the Eisenhower-era foods with which Walter indulged his customers—indulgence, she felt, was the province of dessert—but she had been pleased when she won the account. Over the past few years, she had come to think of Walter as an ally more than a client. Except for the coconut cake (filled with Meyer lemon curd and glazed with brown sugar), most of the desserts she made for Walter were not her best or most original, but they were exemplars of their kind: portly, solid-citizen desserts, puddings of rice, bread, and noodles—sweets that the Pilgrims and other humble immigrants who had scraped together their prototypes would have bartered in a Mayflower minute for Greenie’s blood-orange mousse, pear ice cream, or tiny white-chocolate éclairs. Walter had also commissioned a deep-dish apple pie, a strawberry marble cheesecake, and a layer cake he asked her to create exclusively for him. “Everybody expects one of those, you know, death-by-chocolate things on a menu like mine, but what I want is massacre by chocolate, execution by chocolate—firing squad by chocolate!” he told her. So that very night, after tucking George in bed, Greenie had returned to the kitchen where she made her living, in a basement two blocks from her home, and stayed up till morning to birth a four-layer cake so dense and muscular that even Walter, who could have benched a Shetland pony, dared not lift it with a single hand. It was the sort of dessert that appalled Greenie on principle, but it also embodied a kind of uberprosperity, a transgressive joy, flaunting the potential heft of butter, that Protean substance as wondrous and essential to a pastry chef as fire had been to early man. Walter christened the cake Apocalypse Now; Greenie held her tongue. By itself, this creation doubled the amount of cocoa she ordered from her supplier every month. After it was on his menu for a week, Walter bet her a lobster dinner that before a year was out, Gourmet would request the recipe, putting both of them on a wider culinary map. If that came to pass, Greenie would surrender to the vagaries of fleeting fame, but right now the business ran as smoothly as she could have hoped. She had a diligent assistant and an intern who shopped, cleaned up, made deliveries, and showed up on time. The amount of work they all shared felt just right to Greenie; she could not have taken an order for one more tiny éclair without enlarging the enterprise to a degree where she feared she would begin to lose control. Alan said that what she really feared was honestly growing up, taking her lifelong ambition and molding it into a Business with a capital B. Greenie resented his condescension; if Business with a capital B was the goal of growing up, what was he doing as a private psychotherapist working out of a back-door bedroom that should have belonged to George, who slept in an alcove off their living room meant for a dining room table? Which brought up the subject of George: was Alan unhappy that Greenie’s work, on its present scale, allowed her to spend more time with their son than a Business with a capital B would have done? “Delegation,” said Alan. “It’s called delegation.” This was the sort of bickering that passed too often now between them, and if Greenie blamed Alan for starting these quarrels, she blamed herself for plunging into the fray. Stubbornly, she refused to back down for the sake of greater domestic harmony or to address the underlying dilemma. The overlying dilemma, that much was clear. Through the past year, as Greenie began to turn away clients, Alan was losing them. His schedule had dwindled to half time, and the extra hours it gave him with George did not seem to console him. Alan, two years away from forty, had reached what Greenie privately conceived of as the Peggy Lee stage in life: Is That All There Is? Greenie did not know what to do about this. She would have attacked the problem head on if the sufferer had been one of her girlfriends, but Alan was a man, chronically resentful of direction. When he was with friends, his argumentative nature was his strength, a way of challenging the world and its complacencies, but in private—alone with Greenie—he fell prey to defensiveness and nocturnal nihilism. She had known this before they married, but she had assumed this aspect of his psyche would burn off, under the solar exposure of day-to-day affection, like cognac set aflame in a skillet. Next year they would be married ten years, and it had not. In their first years together, she had loved the wakefulness they shared late at night. After sex, Alan did not tumble into a callow sleep, the way most men claimed they could not resist doing. Like Greenie, he would be alert for another half hour or more. They would talk about their days, their dreams (both sleeping and waking), their notions on the fate of mankind. When it came to worldly matters, the voice of doubt would be Alan’s—mourning or raging that genocide would never end, that presidents would never be moral, that children would always be abducted by men who would never be caught—but he was invariably passionate, and back then, Greenie saw hope in that passion. He loved Greenie expressively, eloquently, in a way she felt she had never been loved. When they had been sleeping together—or not-sleeping together—nearly every night for a month, she asked, “Why do you suppose we’re like this? Why can’t we just go to sleep, like the rest of the exhausted people around us?” They were lying in Alan’s bed, in the never-quite-dark of a city night. He said, “Me, I think too much. Not a good thing.” “Why? Why is that not good?” “It wears down your soul. It’s like grinding your spiritual teeth,” he said. “Dreaming is the healthy alternative. Even nightmares once in a while. Sometimes a nightmare is like a strong wind sweeping through a house.” Greenie had noticed early on that first thing every morning, often before getting out of bed, Alan wrote his dreams in a leather book the size of a wallet. “What about me?” she said. “Do I think too much?” “Not you.” He pulled her closer against his side. “With you, I can only imagine that some part of your waking soul just can’t bear to see another magnificent day in the life of Greenie Duquette come to an end.” “That’s very poetic,” said Greenie, “but it’s malarkey.” “When I’m with you,” he said, “I love not getting to sleep.” He kissed her and kissed her, and then they did fall asleep. The next day, on the phone with her mother, she said she’d met an incredible man, that she had fallen in love. Her mother teased her that it wasn’t the first time, and Greenie said yes, this was true, but she had a hunch it would be the last. Consistent with all the evolutions and revolutions of married life, their wakeful late-night musings came to an end when they had George. In those early months, starved of sleep, their thinking selves would plummet toward oblivion once they lay down. But Alan still slept so lightly that he was nearly always the first to rise and comfort George when he cried. By the time Greenie stumbled to consciousness, there was her baby, in his father’s arms, being soothed until she was ready to nurse. Alan’s only complaint was that waking up so often and so urgently made it hard for him to remember his dreams. Along with so many other habits once taken for granted, the little book went by the wayside. Now Greenie wondered if Alan had needed it more than she understood. Greenie could not point to a specific moment when Alan’s sober but passionate view of the world might have tipped into a hardened pessimism, and she reminded herself that he was still a loving, patient father—but what if that pessimism was genetic? Could it lie dormant in George? When the loaves and cakes she had baked sat cooling on racks, Greenie filled the larger sink with all the loaf pans and whisks, cups and spoons and mixing bowls. Sherwin would show up later to wash them, but Greenie wiped down the counters herself, several times a day. She had made this place—an old boiler room in the basement of a nondescript tenement building—into her private kingdom. Around the perimeter, the walls and cupboards were white, the countertops made of smooth, anonymous steel, but the linoleum tiles that Alan had helped her lay on the floor were gladiola red. The only windows ran along the ceiling at sidewalk level: wide yet narrow, like gunports in a bunker. Sometimes, organizing bills or tinkering with recipes, Greenie sat on a stool at the butcher-block island and watched the ankles passing by these windows. Now and then a dog pressed its face between the bars against the glass, spotted her and wagged its tail. Greenie would smile and wave before the dog was yanked along on its way. She came to recognize the neighborhood regulars: the aging black Lab with the heavily salted muzzle, the twin pugs with their Tammy Faye mascara, the Irish setter who marked the windows with his wayward tongue. Sometimes dog faces were the only ones she saw for hours. Even toddlers were visible only up to the hems of their shorts or jackets. Walter was the one person who would lean down, knock on a pane, and give her an upside-down grin, The Bruce right there beside him. She would know that spring had arrived when green crept into her rabbit’s-eye view, as the small plots of earth around the trees in front of the building filled with hardy weeds or the floral attempts of residents longing in vain for gardens of their own. (The dogs were no help there.) Just below the windows, Greenie had hung her copper and stainless-steel bowls, in pairs. It was a minor joke she still enjoyed: displayed this way, they looked like pairs of great armored breasts, the warrior bosoms of Amazons, of Athena, Brunhilde, and Joan of Arc. Count me in! Greenie told herself while inspecting her private battalion. Carpe diem, ladies!

Reading Group Guide

“Gorgeous. . . . A delicious, delightful, and deeply satisfying tale of domestic choices.”
—The Times-Picayune

The introduction, discussion questions, author biography, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Julia Glass’s national bestseller, The Whole World Over.

1. Julia Glass is a master at creating vivid, believable places. Describe the various places you remember from the novel—New York City’s West Village, Santa Fe, the small island in Maine, Uncle Marsden’s house in Connecticut, Marion’s neighborhood in Berkeley. What are the crucial differences between the various settings? How does place influence lifestyle, life choices, and even the temperaments and the personalities of the characters? Where is “home” for Greenie? For Saga? What about Walter?

2. Describe the structure of the novel. Why does Glass divide her novel into three parts with various chapters? How does she note the passage of time over almost two years? Why do you think the seasons and the holidays are so crucial to this story? Much of Three Junes, Glass’s first novel, was narrated in the first person and in the present tense. Here, however, she’s told the story almost entirely in the past tense and in the third person, from alternating points of view. How is the reader affected differently by these choices? And what about the switch, in the final pages of this novel, to the present tense? Why do you think the author made this switch?

3. Why does Greenie take the opportunity to go to New Mexico? Do you think it was a good decision? Was it in character for her to go? Would you have gone if you were Greenie? Would you have returned to New York in the end?

4. How is teenage love portrayed in the novel? Describe Scott and Sonya’s relationship. Do you think it will last? Why do both Alan and Greenie reconnect with their adolescent loves? Is it nostalgia, memory of youth, or is there something more powerful going on? Is it curiosity about the path not taken?

5. The past seeps into the novel through the various characters’ memories. Greenie does occasionally use recipes and she glances through cookbooks, but much of her cooking is done from memory and experimenting. For what else in her life does she rely on her memory? For Saga, who has lost a great deal of her memory, remembering is the key to being normal again. What is Alan’s take on this? How important are stories of our past in defining who we are in the present? Discuss the importance of family stories in this novel, particularly in connection with Saga and Walter.

6. What kind of mother is Greenie to George? Do you think being a mother defines her? Describe the other mothers in the novel—Alan’s depressed mother; the stylish, well-mannered Olivia Duquette; the Lutheran grandmother who raised Walter. How important in the characters’ lives are memories of their mothers? What do you think about the choices made by Joya and Marion—and Stephen—in their quests for parenthood? What happens to Saga when she learns she was pregnant at the time of her accident? How do you think it will affect her life beyond the end of the novel?

7. The two epigraphs to this novel are from a cookbook and a Dr. Seuss book. How do they set up or relate to the themes and tone of the novel? In Greenie’s interactions with her son, who has just learned to read, and then in certain scenes with Saga, Glass also alludes to or quotes from a number of other children’s books. Do you notice ways in which she’s used specific books to add another dimension to the story that she is writing?

8. There are so many intersecting relationships in The Whole World Over. If you like, try making an actual diagram or map of these relationships. Does this reveal connections you did not notice before? Even Fenno, from Glass’s earlier novel, Three Junes, appears and plays an important part in this novel. If you’ve read Three Junes, do you think Fenno has changed or grown from the last novel to this one? Have the other characters changed by the end of this novel?

9. Choosing the right food for the right occasion is an important part of any chef’s job. Food can be used as manipulation—for instance, in the scene where Ray McCrae asks Greenie to prepare a soufflé for the contentious Water Boys, suggesting that a fancier dessert will “placate” them. Discuss how different kinds of food influence the ways in which people relate. Have you ever used food to get something you wanted?

10. The first time Greenie takes Alan to her parents’ summer home in Maine, she quickly jumps into the cold ocean water, urging Alan to “just make a run for it,” joking that this is her personal motto. Alan retorts that his own motto is “Always test the waters” [p. 192]. How do their chosen careers reflect their personalities? Describe their marriage. Why is it falling apart? Do you think it’s salvageable? From what you learn about Greenie’s and Alan’s parents, how do you think those earlier marriages have shaped their own?

11. Alan remarks to his sister that “honesty can do more harm than good” in a marriage at times [p. 105]. Do you agree with him? If so, in what situations?

12. Why do you think Glass chose to make the monumental, historic events of September 11, 2001, so prominent in a novel about intimate emotions and relationships? Talk about the notion of destiny versus individual determination in this novel. To what extent does each of the major characters freely choose his or her own individual fate?

13. What about the theme of betrayal and forgiveness? Notice how many of the characters betray the people they care about, in subtle as well as obvious ways—not just by being unfaithful, as Gordie, Greenie, and Alan all are, but by threatening the confidence and stability of those around them. What’s going on, for instance, when Joya suggests to Alan that she’s told Greenie about Marion? Or when Greenie’s mother speaks unflatteringly about her daughter to Alan? When Michael criticizes his father’s continuing indulgence of Saga? Does Greenie, in some way, betray her own son as well as her husband when she becomes involved with Charlie? And what about the sexual infidelities? Can you empathize with the characters who have strayed from their commitments? Do you think there will be lasting consequences?

Foreword

1. Julia Glass is a master at creating vivid, believable places. Describe the various places you remember from the novel—New York City’s West Village, Santa Fe, the small island in Maine, Uncle Marsden’s house in Connecticut, Marion’s neighborhood in Berkeley. What are the crucial differences between the various settings? How does place influence lifestyle, life choices, and even the temperaments and the personalities of the characters? Where is “home” for Greenie? For Saga? What about Walter?

2. Describe the structure of the novel. Why does Glass divide her novel into three parts with various chapters? How does she note the passage of time over almost two years? Why do you think the seasons and the holidays are so crucial to this story? Much of Three Junes, Glass’s first novel, was narrated in the first person and in the present tense. Here, however, she’s told the story almost entirely in the past tense and in the third person, from alternating points of view. How is the reader affected differently by these choices? And what about the switch, in the final pages of this novel, to the present tense? Why do you think the author made this switch?

3. Why does Greenie take the opportunity to go to New Mexico? Do you think it was a good decision? Was it in character for her to go? Would you have gone if you were Greenie? Would you have returned to New York in the end?

4. How is teenage love portrayed in the novel? Describe Scott and Sonya’s relationship. Do you think it will last? Why do both Alan and Greenie reconnect with their adolescent loves? Is it nostalgia, memory of youth, or is there something morepowerful going on? Is it curiosity about the path not taken?

5. The past seeps into the novel through the various characters’ memories. Greenie does occasionally use recipes and she glances through cookbooks, but much of her cooking is done from memory and experimenting. For what else in her life does she rely on her memory? For Saga, who has lost a great deal of her memory, remembering is the key to being normal again. What is Alan’s take on this? How important are stories of our past in defining who we are in the present? Discuss the importance of family stories in this novel, particularly in connection with Saga and Walter.

6. What kind of mother is Greenie to George? Do you think being a mother defines her? Describe the other mothers in the novel—Alan’s depressed mother; the stylish, well-mannered Olivia Duquette; the Lutheran grandmother who raised Walter. How important in the characters’ lives are memories of their mothers? What do you think about the choices made by Joya and Marion—and Stephen—in their quests for parenthood? What happens to Saga when she learns she was pregnant at the time of her accident? How do you think it will affect her life beyond the end of the novel?

7. The two epigraphs to this novel are from a cookbook and a Dr. Seuss book. How do they set up or relate to the themes and tone of the novel? In Greenie’s interactions with her son, who has just learned to read, and then in certain scenes with Saga, Glass also alludes to or quotes from a number of other children’s books. Do you notice ways in which she’s used specific books to add another dimension to the story that she is writing?

8. There are so many intersecting relationships in The Whole World Over. If you like, try making an actual diagram or map of these relationships. Does this reveal connections you did not notice before? Even Fenno, from Glass’s earlier novel, Three Junes, appears and plays an important part in this novel. If you’ve read Three Junes, do you think Fenno has changed or grown from the last novel to this one? Have the other characters changed by the end of this novel?

9. Choosing the right food for the right occasion is an important part of any chef’s job. Food can be used as manipulation—for instance, in the scene where Ray McCrae asks Greenie to prepare a soufflé for the contentious Water Boys, suggesting that a fancier dessert will “placate” them. Discuss how different kinds of food influence the ways in which people relate. Have you ever used food to get something you wanted?

10. The first time Greenie takes Alan to her parents’ summer home in Maine, she quickly jumps into the cold ocean water, urging Alan to “just make a run for it,” joking that this is her personal motto. Alan retorts that his own motto is “Always test the waters” [p. 192]. How do their chosen careers reflect their personalities? Describe their marriage. Why is it falling apart? Do you think it’s salvageable? From what you learn about Greenie’s and Alan’s parents, how do you think those earlier marriages have shaped their own?

11. Alan remarks to his sister that “honesty can do more harm than good” in a marriage at times [p. 105]. Do you agree with him? If so, in what situations?

12. Why do you think Glass chose to make the monumental, historic events of September 11, 2001, so prominent in a novel about intimate emotions and relationships? Talk about the notion of destiny versus individual determination in this novel. To what extent does each of the major characters freely choose his or her own individual fate?

13. What about the theme of betrayal and forgiveness? Notice how many of the characters betray the people they care about, in subtle as well as obvious ways—not just by being unfaithful, as Gordie, Greenie, and Alan all are, but by threatening the confidence and stability of those around them. What’s going on, for instance, when Joya suggests to Alan that she’s told Greenie about Marion? Or when Greenie’s mother speaks unflatteringly about her daughter to Alan? When Michael criticizes his father’s continuing indulgence of Saga? Does Greenie, in some way, betray her own son as well as her husband when she becomes involved with Charlie? And what about the sexual infidelities? Can you empathize with the characters who have strayed from their commitments? Do you think there will be lasting consequences?

Editorial Reviews

Glass is too capable to need recipes and four-legged friends to make her fiction a pleasure. It's a tribute to this unassuming but conspicuously talented novelist that even with far too many of them, The Whole World Over so often manages to sing.
— The New York Times

Lorraine Adams

Greenie Duquette loves her cozy life in the West Village, her work as a pastry chef, and her precocious young son. But she is fed up with her husband, Alan, an underemployed psychotherapist whose once passionate beliefs are ossifying into reflexive bitterness. When, in early 2000, the brash Republican governor of New Mexico offers her a lucrative job, she jumps at it; Alan is free to follow her if he chooses. In Glass’s sprawling follow-up to her award-winning novel “Three Junes,” a dozen or so characters are plunged into the tumultuous dissatisfactions and challenges of middle age, their paths crossing and recrossing with a pleasing mixture of chance and inevitability. Glass is fascinated by the ways people gamble both with and for their happiness, but her characters are a little too decent, generous, and forgiving. Even as we watch their dramas unfold in the shadow of 9/11, the potential horror of irrevocable choices eludes us.

The New Yorker

When an author uses the same characters in more than one novel, the audio performance can be accurately compared. Fenno, a gay man who emigrates from Scotland to New York's Greenwich Village, is for many readers the most endearing character in Julia Glass's first novel, Three Junes, read by John Keating, who captured the cadences and charm of Fenno's native land. O'Hare, in contrast, produces a rather vague accent that could be Irish or Scottish. He also endows the New Mexico governor with a Texas accent, though the heartiness with which O'Hare portrays him is perfect. Despite these flaws, O'Hare has an eloquent, easy-to-listen-to voice that covers the large canvas of Glass's novel handily. He does particularly well with the main couple, Alan and Greenie, and O'Hare's rendition of their four-year-old son, George, is marvelous. It's a shame that the audio is not available unabridged through retail outlets. (Books on Tape, a division of Random House, has a 23-hour unabridged version on audible.com.) While condensation may work well for Campbell's Soup and tomes that are improved by having their windy digressions clipped, Glass's novel was one of the most wonderful reads of the summer and didn't need editing. Simultaneous release with the Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 27). (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

How does one follow up a National Book Award? Glass (Three Junes) creates an array of full-bodied yet vulnerable characters whose intersecting lives converge on September 11. Greenie Duquette owns a patisserie in a basement space in Manhattan. Her husband, Alan Glazier, is a psychotherapist with a dwindling practice. Restaurateur Walter recommends Greenie to the governor of New Mexico, who is looking for a chef. Walter has the hots for lawyer Gordie, whose longtime partner, Stephen, suddenly wants a baby. The men take their troubles to Alan, now alone at home while Greenie (really Charlotte) moves their five-year-old son, George, to the wilds of Santa Fe. Saga works for an animal rescue group and suffers from memory loss following an accident; she persuades Alan to adopt a puppy. And bookstore owner Fenno returns from Junes as a foundational piece of this intriguing tapestry. As a poster in Fenno's shop declares about birds, they "fly the whole world over but always find their way back home." Glass's long but always captivating tale is a quilt of many colors and motivations whose strongest threads are love of family and sense of self. Highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/06.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The cultures of Manhattan and New Mexico, straight and gay relationships, parents and children, are sensitively explored in Glass's replete successor to her NBA-winning debut novel, Three Junes (2002). One of that book's principals, Fenno McLeod, pops in from time to time, but he's effectively upstaged by Glass's effervescent protagonist Charlotte Greenaway ("Greenie") Duquette, an accomplished pastry chef whose creations attract the hungry attention of the abovementioned state's knee-jerk conservative, ebulliently skirt-chasing Governor Ray McCrae. When Greenie accepts an invitation to move southwest and concoct sinful delicacies for Governor Ray, she takes along her lively, formidably articulate four-year-old George, leaving her husband, psychotherapist Alan Glazier, to his increasingly demanding patients and his own depressive thoughts about the hitherto happy marriage from which both he and Greenie seem to be detaching themselves. Meanwhile, Glass adroitly fills in everybody's backstory, including those of Greenie's best pal Walter, a gay restaurateur with his own relationship issues (which he tends to confide to his dyspeptic Scottish terrier, affectionately known as "The Bruce"). Action, reflection and detailed flashbacks thus move smoothly, between geographical polarities, and among the conflicting viewpoints of variously involved other characters. For example, Alan's practice acquaints him with a male pair of prospective parents, one of whom is the lawyer (Gordie) for whom Walter not-so-subtly lusts. Glass stumbles somewhat with the character of Saga, a young woman whose memory loss and poignant rootlessness rather too pointedly underscore this novel's otherwise absorbing analysesof "human emotions and personal histories." Thankfully, there's always Governor Ray, chortling and backslapping, shaking the novel alive whenever it veers toward soppiness. Glass knows what she's doing. Readers who love quirky characters and a gentle wit that breathes affection even as it skewers human foolishness and frailty will follow her anywhere. First printing of 200,000

Kirkus Reviews

Gorgeous. . . . delicious, delightful, and deeply satisfying.” —The Times-Picayune

 “Her second novel is even finer than her first. . . . Glass offers unobtrusive yet resounding insights into the paradoxes of families, the necessary solace of friendship and the volatility of intimate relationships gay and straight. Her social commentary is at once mischievous and trenchant.” —Chicago Tribune

 “Enormously appealing and inventive . . . sure to solidify Julia Glass’ reputation as one of America's most talented younger novelists.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 “A generous, tentacled, ensemble novel. . . . [Glass] is deft at the quick portraiture and character shorthand that this novelistic approach requires.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

 “Glass pins down these lives with verve, precision, and depth.... A wise book, with breadth as well as depth.” —The Oregonian

From the Publisher

Julia Glass’s second novel explores the psychological intricacies that twist motives, form expectations, and reveal the depth and nature of relationships. Denis O’Hare narrates Greenie and Alan’s story as they weather the ennui that follows years of marriage, middle age, “and all the natural shocks.” Greenie takes their son and leaves Alan, New York City, and her best friend, Walter, a gay man with his own love problems, and heads to New Mexico to work for the governor. O’Hare never lets events slip into soap opera. From larger-than-life governor to conscientious aide, from precocious 4-year-old to brain-damaged young woman, O’Hare’s cool yet engaging voice avoids sentimentality while still allowing each character his or her humanity. O’Hare’s performance and this first-rate abridgment treat Glass’s novel with care and respect. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 06 - AudioFile