The Whole World Over: A Novel

From Publishers Weekly 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New Yorker 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. Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker - click here to subscribe. From Bookmarks Magazine In her second novel, Julia Glass, author of the National Book Award?winning Three Junes (2002), again tells a tale of overlapping lives. While some critics compared Whole World Over to her debut novel and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City , most agree that Glass's latest effort, while still compelling, delivers a less powerful punch. Critics generally praised the fleshed-out characters (including Fenno McLeod from Three Junes ), who move to and from New York, New Mexico, Maine, Massachusetts, and California. More debated the detailsx97the use of 9/11 as a literary device and the lavish descriptions of coconut and chocolate cakes, for example. If not as acclaimed as Three Junes , Whole World Over reveals Glass's ample talents. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist The many readers who embraced Glass' National Book Award-winning debut, hree Junes (2002), will be pleased to learn that one of the novel's central characters, New York city bookstore owner Fenno McLeod, plays a role in her follow-up. In the same neighborhood as Fenno's store, Greenie Duquette, a young wife and mother, labors over her rich pastries, which, thanks to her friend Walter, catch the notice of New Mexico governor Ray McCrae. Ray offers Greenie the chance to be his personal chef, so she and her young son, George, head to New Mexico, leaving behind her therapist husband, Alan, with a dwindling practice. Alan befriends Saga, a young woman whose sense of purpose in life was taken away when an accident affected her appearance and memory. Meanwhile, Walter is embroiled in an affair with a man who recently separated from his lover but might not be so ready to move on. As the characters grapple with change and uncertainty in their lives, Glass gracefully builds up to the traumatic event that will affect them all, deftly exploring the sacrifices, compromises, and leaps of faith that accompany love. Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Praise for The Whole World Over “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 . . . 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 (starred review) “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 . . . 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.”– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“[A] winning second novel . . . Harks back to Trollope and Tolstoy. Like her predecessors, [Glass] finds inspiration in the vicissitudes of family strife . . . Watching Glass sort out a dozen intersecting story lines is never less than fascinating. In keeping with her nineteenth-century influences, she resolves all loose ends, treating everyone with remarkable evenhandedness in her bustling, congenial world.”–Elizabeth Judd, The Atlantic Monthly “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 . . . 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.”– Library Journal "A voluptuous treat." --Entertainment Weekly, A-"Glass gracefully [and] deftly explores the sacrifices, compromises, and leaps of faith that accompany love." --Booklist"This delicious novel is so like life." --MorePraise for Three Junes “ Three Junes brilliantly rescues, then refurbishes, the traditional plot–driven novel . . . Glass has written a generous book about family expectations—but also about happiness.” — The New York Times Book Review “Radiant . . . an intimate literary triptych of lives pulled together and torn apart.” — Chicago Tribune “Enormously accomplished . . . rich, absorbing, and full of life.” — The New Yorker “ Three Junes almost threatens to burst with all the life it contains. Glass’s ability to illuminate and deepen the mysteries of her characters’ lives is extraordinary.” —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours “A warm, wise debut . . . Three Junes marks a blessed event for readers of literary fiction everywhere.” — San Francisco Chronicle Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award for her novel Three Junes, was a 2004—2005 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her short stories have been honored with three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award. Until recently a longtime New Yorker, she now lives with her family in Massachusetts. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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... Read more