By Eva Ciabattoni
Agent Donald Maass writes that most literary novels that land on his desk lack plot. And so it is with “Three Junes” (Pantheon, 2002), Julia Glass’s National Book Award-winning debut novel.
The narrative is organized into three parts that take place in June - in 1989, Paul mourns the death of his wife Maureen to lung cancer; in 1995, Paul’s sons Fenno, Dennis and David gather at their childhood home in Scotland to mourn their father’s death while Fenno mourns the death of friend Malachy (Mal); and in 1999, Fern, who met Paul in Greece in 1989, mourns the death of her husband and Fenno buries his border collie, the last of the line bred by his mother. The literal and figurative funeral pyres of the dead provide a mighty heap of ashes out of which the phoenix of hope and renewal may rise.
In an interview with BookBrowse, Glass said, “While writing … the third part, it hit me that what I was writing, structurally, was a triptych - that is, a strong central image flanked by two narrower, more modest images.”
The central image is Mal, dying of AIDS, told in flashback by Fenno, who in the same section narrates the bonds and breaches among the McLeod brothers. This section is so strong and the character of Mal so gorgeously complex that the two bookends of Paul and Fern lean on it and, rather than support it, detract from it.
A triptych works in art precisely because the eye is drawn to the center. In fiction, because we read from book jacket to book jacket, left to right if you will, the weighting is reversed. The effect in “Junes” is of an author not confident or courageous enough to let the primary story stand on its own merits. There is nothing in either of the two flanking sections that could not have been worked into the central narrative.
What Glass achieves with language is extremely difficult to do and sustain page after page - she makes it look effortless. Frightened of AIDS, Fenno lives in self-imposed celibacy, concentrating on his bookshop and walking off his repressed desires while occasionally visiting a hangout to see if he can still draw an invitation. Glass has him say wryly, “Yes, I was the king of catch-and-release cruising.” An island’s shore viewed from a ferry is “salted with patches of humid evening mist.” Sheep are wonderfully described as “a grimy cloudmass.”
But Glass seems to tire at the end, and the reader begins to notice the shin splints of the brain in overwrought phrases like “a shovel assaulting the earth” when plain digging is meant, or “feeling the icy cold … thrill its way into your bloodstream” as a simile for drinking wine. The aside that Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is “joy distilled” is unnecessary chewing of the cud. All these literary misdemeanors occur in the last section - confirming that it should have been guillotined. (See, writerly excess is contagious.)
It was refreshing to see a book defy the agent’s assumption about plot, especially high-stakes plot, being the one absolute necessity in a novel. What we readers crave is a mirror held up to someone else’s humanity so that we may gain perspective on our own. And this is where Glass delivers.
