The Whole World Over
Julia Glass, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400075768
Summary
From the author of the beloved novel Three Junes comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four-year-old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart.
It is at Walter's restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie's coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts-and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie's orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made-or has refused to face.
Julia Glass is at her best here, weaving a glorious tapestryof lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In The Whole World Over she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 23, 1956
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale College
• Awards—Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, 1999; Nelson Algren
Fiction Awards, 1993, 1996, 2000; National Book Award for
Fiction, 2002
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
After graduating from Yale with a degree in art, Julia Glass received a fellowship to study figurative painting in Paris. Upon her return, she moved to New York, where she became involved in the city's vibrant art scene, worked as a copy editor, and wrote the occasional magazine column. She had always been a good writer, but her energies were initially focused on an art career. Finally, the pull to write became too strong. Glass put down her paint brush and picked up her pen.
One of her earliest short stories, never published, was a semi-autobiographical piece called "Souvenirs." Loosely based on her experiences as a student traveling in Greece, the story was (by Glass's own admission) pretty formulaic. Yet, she found herself returning to it over the years, haunted by the faint memory of someone she had met on that trip: an older man whose wife had recently died.
Then, during the early 1990s, Glass experienced some serious setbacks in her life: Within the space of a few years, her marriage ended in divorce, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her beloved younger sister—a dynamic woman with a seemingly wonderful life—committed suicide. Devastated by her sister's death, Glass turned to writing as a way of working through her grief and loss. Suddenly, the memory of the sad widower in Greece took on a melancholy resonance. She retrieved "Souvenirs" from her desk drawer for one final rewrite, expanded it to novella length, and spun it from a different point of view. Renamed "Collies," the story won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Medal in 1999. It also became the first section of Glass's remarkable 2002 debut novel, the National Book Award winner Three Junes.
After a spate of "postmodern" bestsellers, Three Junes was like a breath of fresh air, harkening back to an era of more straightforward, gimmick-free writing. Spanning a period of ten years (1989-1999), the novel covers three disparate, event-filled months in the lives of a well-to-do Scottish family named McLeod, weaving a cast of colorful, interconnected characters into a tapestry of contemporary social mores that would do Glass's 19th-century role model George Eliot proud.
The same dazzling sprawl that distinguished her acclaimed debut has characterized Glass's subsequent efforts—rich, dense narratives that unfold from multiple points of view and illuminate the full, complicated spectrum of relationships (among parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers). In an interview with NPR, she explained her penchant for ensemble casts and panoramic multidimensional stories: "I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in."
Extras
From a 2002 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Glass's first published writing was a regular column on pets called "Animal Love" that ran in Glamour magazine for two years in the late eighties. Says Glass, "I grew up in a home where animals were ever-present and often dominated our lives. There were always horses, dogs, and cats, as well as a revolving infirmary of injured wildlife being nursed by my sister the aspiring vet. Without any conscious intention on my part, animals come to play a significant role in my fiction: in Three Junes, a parrot and a pack of collies; in The Whole World Over, a bulldog named The Bruce. To dog lovers, by the way, I recommend My Dog Tulip by J. R. Ackerley—by far the best 'animal book' I've ever read."
• She is an avid rug-hooker in her free time. She explains that "unlike the more restrictive needlepoint, this medium permits me to work with yarn in a fluid, painterly fashion." Several of her rugs were reproduced in a book called Punch Needle Rug Hooking, by Amy Oxford (Schiffer Books).
• Glass considers herself a "confirmed, unrepentant late bloomer." She explains, "I talked late, swam late, did not learn to ride a bike until college —and might never have walked or learned to drive a car if my parents hadn't overruled my lack of motivation and virtually forced me to embrace both forms of transportation. I suspect I was happy to sit in a corner with a book. Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do."
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is how she responded:
I cannot imagine how many books I've read in my life so far — and to name a "favorite" would be impossible, but the most influential, hands down, was Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, because, though it's certainly flawed, it's the book that put me to work writing fiction as an adult. As a child, and through college, I had always loved reading and writing, but the notion of "being a writer" wasn't one I thought much about pursuing; perhaps writing came so naturally to me from an early age that I took it for granted, saw it as a means rather than a possible "end," a life's labor unto itself. My professional sights were set on the visual arts; In college I majored in art, then won a fellowship to spend a year painting abroad after graduation, and then, like so many artists, found myself in New York City holding down a day job as a copy editor and painting at night. I was showing my work here and there, but I was also reading a great deal.
Having adored Middlemarch in college, I picked up Daniel Deronda—and fell so deeply in love with the experience of reading it that, now in my late twenties, I began to yearn to write fiction for the first time since high school. George Eliot's astonishingly beautiful use of language, her nearly contemptible yet ultimately captivating heroine—Gwendolen Harleth, who remains one of my favorite all-time characters—and the daring structure of the novel itself, the way it leaves major characters offstage for significant stretches, all made me think at length about what an extraordinary thing a book really is—and suddenly I wanted, fiercely, to be making up stories of my own. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble .)
Book Reviews
Dejected, depressed...I'd just finished a number of books by well-known authors but couldn't recommend any of them. Then I picked up this beautiful book. Glass weaves her characters' lives together—deftly, without being overly manipulative or controlling. Her characters' stories are beautifully rendered....
A LitLovers Pick (Oct. '07)
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.
Lorraine Adams - The New York Times
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
(Starred review.) In her second rich, subtle novel, Glass reveals how the past impinges on the present, and how small incidents of fate and chance determine the future. Greenie Duquette has a small bakery in Manhattan's West Village that supplies pastries to restaurants, including that of her genial gay friend Walter. When Walter recommends Greenie to the governor of New Mexico, she seizes the chance to become the Southwesterner's pastry chef and to take a break from her marriage to Alan Glazier, a psychiatrist with hidden issues. Taking their four-year-old son, George, with her, Greenie leaves for New Mexico, while figures from her and Alan's pasts challenge their already strained marriage. Their lives intersect with those of such fully dimensional secondary characters as Fenno McLeod, the gay bookseller from Three Junes; Saga, a 30-something woman who lost her memory in an accident; and Saga's Uncle Marsden, a Yale ecologist who takes care of her. While this work is less emotionally gripping than Three Junes, Glass brings the same assured narrative drive and engaging prose to this exploration of the quest for love and its tests—absence, doubt, infidelity, guilt and loss.
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. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
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 of the novel? To its tone? 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." 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. 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?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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