Three Junes
by Julia Glass
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Book Summary Information
Author: Julia GlassEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04
ISBN: 0385721420
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780385721424
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Three Junes
Book Review: Intoxicating
Summary: 5 Stars
When Jonathan Safran Foer's name first hit the bookstores on the cover of his debut best seller, Everything is Illuminated, expectations were high and eyebrows were raised. Widely hyped, admired, and considered the newest literary sensation, Safran Foer's absence from the National Book Award nominations made waves within the book world. Heads turned when the his fellow debut writer Julia Glass's novel won the coveted prize for fiction. Comparatively unknown, Glass wrote her book at the age of 46, while Jonathan Safran Foer was merely 22 when he completed his novel. He had spent practically a lifetime preparing for his massive undertaking of language, studying writing under Joyce Carol Oates and winning every Creative Writing contest Princeton offered during his time as an ambitious undergraduate. Another Ivy graduate, Glass left Yale with an Art degree and half a lifetime of the unknown in front of her before she would achieve the success that would rival Safran Foer. But according to one of Three Junes vivid characters, "When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be." If Three Junes is any indication, then award-winning contemporary fiction is exactly what Glass intended on.
Julia Glass' age and experience in studio art are reflected in her beautifully composed narrative. Three Junes manages to cover death, secrets, and heartbreaking love between friends, family, and lovers. Surprisingly, Glass is able to evade the painstaking sentimentalism that a lesser skilled author, like Safran Foer, might fall victim. The novel is constructed as a tryptic, or a painting consisting of three canvases fastened together, the middle canvas often the larger focal point of the composition. The first section, Collies, introduces the reader to Paul McLeod, a recent Scottish widower vacationing in Greece in 1989. Paul's interest in a young, vernal American art student (aptly named Fern) and his moving, yet matter of fact, memories of his late wife are enough bate to reel the reader in. However, it is not until the second section of the novel that one realized the complexity and intoxication of Three Junes.
In second of the Three Junes entitled Upright, Paul's oldest son, Fenno, is narrating his father's funeral arrangements at the McLeod's Scottish estate in 1995. Back and forth through time, Fenno presently admits his envy towards his younger twin brothers' ideal, yet problematic, married lives. In discovering Fenno's past, the reader witnesses his isolating intellectual strength, as well as his paralyzing fear of his own homosexuality. Most potently depicted through his friendship with Mal, here, Glass fully fleshes out her characters into living, breathing people by combining rich, descriptive prose with sharp, realistic witticisms.
"Mal's eyes were his most striking feature. A very pale blue, the color of shaded snow, they could appear almost white, like a blind man's eyes, when caught in the sun. Now they brightened with tears, and a ghastly silence spread between us. He said at last, `I am regrettably, to use the medical softshell, `immuno-compromised.'"
Glass proficiently describes Fenno's preoccupation of contracting HIV. "Upright, I would tell myself as I savored the visual innuendos of a trimly mustached business student, as I pictured us falling together into my bed. Stay upright and you will stay alive." Though the entire novel deals with death, this is Fenno's only admission that he, himself, fears for his own mortality.
Boys, the final section of the novel, focuses on Fern's retrospective view of her own life as she makes plans for the future among men that have ties to her past. It feels more of an epilogue than another completed section, tracing Fenno's reentry into life, and tying up some important loose ends that make the section ultimately worthwhile.
An author often needs to clear her throat before she gets to the meat of her writing. Glass, in one way or another, has been accused of this by many critics, who argue that Upright is the pinnacle of the novel, totally outweighing its adjoining parts. And although Upright could arguable stand on its own, its role as the large, important center of the tryptic must be considered before any disdain is relegated towards its counterparts. The choice of focus remains in the artist's hand, or in this case, pen. Fenno's life is the centerpiece, totally in focus, while Paul and Fern are on the peripheral, framing Fenno's dominant story, creating a marked centerpiece painted in a rich textural experience.
Glass' dense writing is lush and arresting, forcing the reader to absorb every sultry phrase before continuing on with the story. Although overwriting is a typical weakness of many beginners, Glass manages to create rich, slow-moving images without weighing down Three Junes in any unnecessary literary baggage. But throughout her sumptuous prose, she includes contemporary references to OJ Simpson and fertility drugs that send a jolted rush of reality through the timeless world she creates.
Three Junes' elegant portrayal of a young man's life that revolves around repressed homosexuality and the AIDs epidemic is reminiscent of another highly acclaimed novel of 2002. Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize winning, Middlesex, concerns a young, hermaphroditic Greek individual who similarly suffers from academic brilliance and a well-detailed lineage in addition to her sexual apprehension. However, Glass manages to bring a distinct light to pleasure and pain of family, as well as a fresh way of dealing with the trauma of being in love-- in life and in death. "Some of us get love just . . . exactly . . . right-- as right as it can be," Glass writes, "--and others get everything else right but."
"I will need to sleep for hours and hours before waking to look again at the life I am learning, just learning to live," Fenno says at the end of Upright. For a novel that so grimly delves into the depths of post-mortem anxiety, Glass succeeds by filling the pages of Three Junes with an overwhelming sense of life. Her maturity and artistry foster a winning story cradled in impressive prose that skillfully trades the typical sentimental panacea for realistic poignance. Julia Glass certainly proves herself worthy of the National Book Award and a highly esteemed spot in contemporary fiction-- Whether she intended to be here, or not.
Summary of Three Junes
An astonishing first novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises.In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. . ..Six years later, again in June, Paul?s death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as a bookseller in Greenwich Village, Fenno is stunned by a series of revelations that threaten his carefully crafted defenses. . .. Four years farther on, in yet another June, a chance meeting on the Long Island shore brings Fenno together with Fern Olitsky, the artist who once captivated his father. Now pregnant, Fern must weigh her guilt about the past against her wishes for the future and decide what family means to her. In prose rich with compassion and wit, Three Junes paints a haunting portrait of love?s redemptive powers.
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