Glass houses

Evaluating the National Book Award-winner

By John Freeman

THREE JUNES By Julia Glass, Pantheon, New York. 353 pages. $25.

One of the best things about Julia Glass’s National Book Award winning debut novel, Three Junes, is its backdrop — or backdrops, as it were. The novel’s opening section takes place on an island off the coast of Greece, complete with blinding white stucco houses and midnight-blue seas. From there the story roams around to New York’s Greenwich Village, Scotland, Paris, the Hamptons, and more. If any book begs for a Merchant-Ivory film treatment, this is it.

But, as with any serious tale with eye-popping scenery, there’s an undercurrent of sadness here. Glass’s large cast has flung themselves to these picturesque places hoping for something new. Some have freshly buried spouses; others simply want to throw off the old. Gracefully, patiently, Three Junes shows us how these people try to start over, only to discover doing so is harder than they’d ever imagined.

Three Junes unfolds in three parts over 10 years. At the heart of the novel are the McLeods, a Scottish clan that has dispersed from their rural roots. Death brings them back together. In the novel’s first section, Paul McLeod rounds up his three sons for their mother’s funeral. In the second section, Paul’s death brings them together once again. And in the final section the novel takes up the story of Fern, a woman Paul met on a trip to Greece. Back in New York, she is starting a whole new life, pregnant, and a widow.

Although the novel’s three-part structure might seem a distraction — as soon as one grows comfortable with one tale, the setting and characters change — Glass turns its potential weaknesses into strengths. Because Glass presents a multiplicity of viewpoints, and scatters her chronology, the McLeods become an incredibly three-dimensional family. We watch them miscommunicate and strive, fall into patterns which they don’t even realize mirror those of their brothers and parents.

Of all the characters, Paul’s son, Fenno, is the most compellingly drawn. Unlike his twin brothers, who remain in Scotland, Fenno winds up in New York, where being out and gay requires less explanation to others. There, as owner of a small independent bookstore, and caretaker to a critic named Mal, who is dying of AIDS, he becomes something of a fixture in gay society, and, yet, on the inside he’s still happiest when his nose is in a book.

Together, Mal and Fenno make a hilarious duo, the first so full of skepticism and bile that he’s comical, the latter so gentle you worry over his feelings being hurt. One of the book’s most tender scenes occurs when Mal comes over to Fenno’s with his pet parrot, Felicity, and gives the bird to his friend because he can no longer care for it.

Although Three Junes switches narrators twice, Glass’s prose remains supple and light throughout, full of delicate little ellipses that evoke the fullness, the strangeness of consciousness. When it comes to scenery, too, Glass takes nothing for granted. Unlike other writers, who might simply drop their characters in a picturesque setting and assume it speaks for itself, Glass goes out of her way to capture the texture of light, the scent of breezes.

The danger of this kind of attention to detail is overwriting, and there are moments in Three Junes that Glass’s prose could have benefited from some careful pruning. For example, in one scene, later in the book, Fern lies on her bed and watches as the “lights of a car move maple branches across the wall, across the painting of boats at sea.” It’s a lovely image until Glass tacks on the boats at sea.

Complaints such as these took on a new importance when Glass won the National Book Award last week, beating out a foursome of fresh-faced finalists, not to mention other previous winners like John Updike, Alice McDermott, Tim O’Brien, and William Gaddis, all of whom published books this year but did not make the short list. Is this book better than Jonathan Safran Foer’s astonishing debut, Everything is Illuminated, or William Kennedy’s rip-rollicking latest installment in his Albany cycle, Roscoe?

Such complaints feel nitpicky, however, when cast in the light of this book’s understated wisdom. There are no speeches or expository riffs on the nature of family; there is very little dialogue that one wants to underline for its significance. Still, by showing how the McLeods come together and drift apart, making new families of their own, Julia Glass has created a clan of fabulous, concrete humanity. Get to know them.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.

A slow death THE LITTLE FRIEND By Donna Tartt, Knopf, 555 pages. $26. Literary styles, like those of fashion, are destined to obsolescence. Occasionally, however, there’s a trend that hangs around too long and suffers from longevity, like go-go boots, shoulder pads, or, in American fiction, the Southern gothic novel. For the past 50 years, it has become a rite of passage for writers born south of the Mason & Dixon line to own up to this crazy aunt in their attic. And it’s not hard to understand why. Back when Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers were its key practitioners, Southern gothic was a potent response to the legacy of Reconstruction and institutionalized poverty, as well as the mark of a still-vibrant regional literary tradition. Today it has become a carnival of stereotypes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Donna Tartt’s long-awaited second novel, The Little Friend, which arrived this month in stores after a 10-year gestation period. It is packed with the hallmarks of high-Gothic style. Kudzu-choked crumbling mansion with a weird name? Check. Snake-wielding preacher with a creepy interest in children? Check. Danger lurking under every wisteria vine? Check. At the heart of this long novel is Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, a precocious 12-year-old with a yen for adventure tales and a morbid fascination with her brother’s murder, which occurred in broad daylight when she was just a baby. Harriet has lived in the pall of this event ever since. As the novel opens, she decides that if she can’t bring her brother back, she’ll at least find his killer. With her mother sleeping 16 hours a day and her father constantly up in Nashville night-clubbing, she turns to a gullible neighbor boy for help. Readers expecting a page-turner from Ms. Tartt should think again. Unlike her blockbuster debut, The Secret History, this book crawls along like an August afternoon in the Delta. Her paragraphs eddy and pool in Harriet’s family line (grandmother, three aunts, and a beloved black maid) only to flow sluggishly onward, with many stops along the way to note the flora and fauna of Mississippi with arboretum-level specificity. It’s all here, the pageantry and rot of the Deep South in its 1970s version: the majorettes and hillbillies with muscle cars; the four-flushing deacons and gossiping church ladies; the newly integrated races settling into watchful détente. Although making one’s way through Ms. Tartt’s prose requires some patience — the print, by the way, is small — the lushness and languor of her delivery does help us see Harriet’s point of view: She wonders whether her brother’s murder hasn’t been solved yet because folks are just plain lazy. Harriet and neighbor-boy friend — shades of To Kill a Mockingbird — learn otherwise when their research leads them to a family called the Ratliffs, whose ranks include a revivalist preacher, a sweaty-palmed simpleton, and a crank-producing ex-con with one eye. Convinced that one of them is guilty, Harriet plans her revenge. Until this point in the novel, the only thing The Little Friend shared with its predecessor was a murder in the foreground, but as its themes rise to the surface, it seems less like a departure for Ms. Tartt. The Secret History brought to life a snobbish coterie of Greek majors who band together when they accidentally murder a farmer. In their zest to keep the secret, the tale reveals how reckless arrogance can become fatal. In a similar vein, The Little Friend explores the dangers of youth and innocence. Overfed with adventure stories and tales of Houdini’s great escapes, Harriet thinks she’s being awfully clever. As an amateur sleuth, however, she doesn’t understand real danger, and she is too young to understand why her family made an uneasy peace with their grief. This is rich material, but unlike The Secret History, The Little Friend dilutes its most potent observations with a host of tertiary subjects, from the myth-making ethos of Southern culture to the collapsing of class divisions since desegregation. And here is the risk of employing a Gothic style. Its decadence can warp a structure, as Ms. Tartt dryly notes of that quintessential wisteria. “It was pretty enough when the flowers were in bloom, but the rest of the time it was a shaggy mess and besides, the weight of it was liable to pull the porch down . . . but some people had to learn the hard way.” Indeed, they do. —JF