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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... West Salem Branch Library | LP Glass, J. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Woodburn Public Library | Glass | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The award-winning author on her best subject--family secrets--in the story of a middle-aged man who searches for his father, upending relationships beyond his own and changing forever the way he fits into the world he thought he knew so well.
Kit Noonan's life is stalled: unemployed, twins to help support, a mortgage to pay--and a frustrated wife, who is certain that more than anything else, Kit needs to solve the mystery of his father's identity. He begins with a visit to his former stepfather, Jasper, a take-no-prisoners Vermont outdoorsman. But it is another person who has kept the secret: Lucinda Burns, wife of a revered senior statesman and mother of Malachy (the journalist who died of AIDS in Glass's first novel, "Three Junes"). She and her husband are the only ones who know the full story of an accident whose repercussions spread even further when Jasper introduces Lucinda to Kit. Immersing readers in a panorama that stretches from Vermont to the tip of Cape Cod, Glass weaves together the lives of Kit, Jasper, Lucinda and ultimately, Fenno McLeod, the beloved protagonist of "Three Junes" (now in his sixties). An unforgettable novel about the youthful choices that steer our destinies, the necessity of forgiveness, and the surprisingly mutable meaning of family.
Author Notes
Julia Glass was born March 23, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award in 2002. Her latest novel is entitled, The Widower's tale.
She grew up in Lincoln, MA, and graduated from Yale in 1978. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her partner, photographer Dennis Cowley. She has two children and works as a freelance journalist and editor.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
THE LOST OR UNKNOWN parent tantalizes from behind the drape. The child cast off or left behind spins absence into myth. Most of us are given little to imagine about our mothers and fathers; they stand squarely before us on their fallen arches. We know from whom we got our own flat feet. The forsaken child, though, can hope for better, also that a bit of the mystery has been passed on to him, a secret compartment holding an untapped talent, an innate courage, a sensitive nature. And, against the evidence, love may also wait. Kit Noonan, the protagonist of Julia Glass's latest warmhearted novel, "And the Dark Sacred Night," is achy with this particular longing, since his mother has steadfastly refused to provide him with the smallest clue about the identity of his father. It is this blank that fills the frame of Kit's midlife crisis. An art historian in his 40s, he has run off the rails of tenure. With two kids and an exasperated wife, he needs to find if not a spiritual path, at least an actual job. His wife, although not a professional psychologist, confidently diagnoses the root of his inertia as not knowing his paternity and prescribes an existential road trip. So Kit heads north to see if his stepfather, Jasper, knows anything. Jasper is a stock rustic pulled off the "flinty" shelf. He likes his dogs husky (as opposed to one of "those poodle-doodles"), is skeptical of modern salads made of "rich people's weeds," rues that he sees his son and grandkids "once in a polka-dot moon." He is also a deeply decent guy who raised Kit as his own, gave him his name and kept him when Kit's mother, Daphne, left to marry someone new. In spite of this generosity, Kit has fallen out of touch with him. Bloodwise, Jasper is not the real deal. Jasper knows that Kit's father, like Kit's mother, was a musician and that they met as teenagers at a prestigious music camp. And he recalls the family's name. A bit of cyberstalking and Jasper and Kit have the goods. Kit's father, Malachy Burns, was, in his prime, the chief music critic for The New York Times - ambitious and edgy, gay and sexually active during the first assault of AIDS, dead since the late 1980s. Years before that, though, one night at the music camp (a summer that is flashed back to throughout the book), Daphne's stealthy late-night slip into Malachy's bunk provided him a brief moment of heterosexuality. And, of course, as fate would have it. . . . So although Kit has no father to be found, he does have a grandmother who has been waiting for him since she was shut out of his life by Daphne. He also has an unsuspecting family circle. Some of its members might already be known to Glass's readers. A charming aspect of her fiction is that certain characters roam widely through her work. Malachy's mother, Lucinda, and his friend Fenno were first seen in Glass's debut novel, "Three Junes," a National Book Award winner. In this new one, the baton of narrative perspective is passed from Kit to Jasper to Lucinda to Fenno. Everyone in this assembly is related by blood or love or friendship. And they're big on gathering. They also have individual pasts, which divert attention from the fact that not much is happening in the present. The book's large set pieces are family affairs : Thanksgiving dinner, a Cape Cod holiday, a pilgrimage to the music camp where Kit was conceived. Chatter skims along a boilerplate surface. It seems as if breakfast, lunch or dinner is always being readied, often by one or another of the substantial contingent of gay guys in the mix. At Thanksgiving, the reader is even given a seating chart: "Lucinda and Zeke occupy their customary ends of the table. Cyril and Greg sit to either side of Lucinda, Madison and Christina flanking Zeke. Jonathan, who is filling everyone's champagne glass (and this time Lucinda accepts), has a place between Madison and her father." I have to admit I didn't find this particularly helpful. As usual, Glass is deft at description. Many of her images linger for a long while after you read them. Sketching a place where nature still trumps man-made, she positions Jasper in a huge snowstorm that shuts everything down: "Exactly as he turns back to the house, the lights go out. Every pane goes black, leaving a mosaic of afterburn on his field of vision." Catching a tiny moment of parenthood, she has Kit notice that his son has grown stockier than his twin sister: "His body has begun to look distinctly male in its dialogue with the ground." As it turns out, the Malachy that Kit pieces together from snapshots and memories was snarky, self-involved, intent on making an impression. One old photograph has him lounging in a tuxedo, a red parrot on his shoulder. "He will always be, to some extent, a blur - from so many angles, his image remains obstinately shadowed, hopelessly smudged - but he is no longer a phantom. And there are so many shapes that phantom might have taken (a lascivious older man, a drunken acquaintance in a bar, a violent stranger) that it decidedly didn't." When Kit holds a photo of Malachy next to his face in the mirror, it's hard to find the resemblance. "But in this picture Malachy is younger than Kit; he cannot be anything but younger. What does it mean to discover your father when you are older than he would ever be? Kit worries that he is unable to feel sad enough. Too often now, he wonders what it is he should feel." THE READER MAY have a similar reaction, never quite believing in these people or in what links them to one another. Part of this can be attributed to a loose authorial grip on character management. Like a teacher on a field trip, shooing along too many students and their dropped lunch bags and lost mittens, Glass has her hands full keeping everyone on the page, let alone making significant connections among them. And in truth, significant connection rarely happens at family gatherings. These get-togethers really serve to find references in the past, update the present and smoke pipe dreams for the next generation. "And the Dark Sacred Night" echoes a culture that has taken perhaps too many photos of itself near bodies of water, grouped around roasted birds, amid carpets full of spent wrapping paper, flanking someone in a mortar board - a pre-formatted, self-congratulatory notion of family. What Glass doesn't get at is the monster cage match - the raw power of love, ignition of nerves, pure blue flame of hatred each of us can feel for this small collection of others we never asked for and yet are bound to. 'What does it mean to discover your father when you are older than he would ever be?' CAROL ANSHAW'S most recent novel is "Carry the One."
Library Journal Review
Glass (Three Junes) hits another home run with this story of Kit Noonan, a middle-aged man at a turning point in his life. He is currently unemployed and at the insistence of his wife goes in search of the father he never met. Kit's mother raised him alone and has refused to tell him his father's name. With the help of his stepfather, Kit finds his paternal grandmother and reunites with his father's family. This is a story about family secrets and the importance of knowing where you come from. The characters are well drawn, and the plot is engaging and believable. Mark Deakins's narration is excellent, except for a few times when the plot shifts gears and it's hard to follow who is telling the story. Verdict For popular collections. ["Examining complicated family relationships among several families whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways, this warm and engaging story about what it means to be a father will appeal to most readers," read the review of the Pantheon hc, LJ 2/1/14.]-Michele Lauer-Bader, formerly with Half Hollow Hills Community Lib., Dix Hills, NY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.