Fiction: Three Junes won the American National Book Winner Award for 2002. But it also won the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society Award for Best Novella for its opening third, 'Collies'. The latter is the more important prize because it was won for the section of the book which is, by far, the best, writesJohn McKenna
Julia Glass began her working life as a painter and, in an interview about Three Junes, she compares it to a triptych, with its first and third sections surrounding the "momentous central image". Unfortunately, it's that very section of the novel, 'Upright', which implodes like a collapsing meringue. I choose that image carefully because Glass is obsessed with food and its place in her characters' lives.
The book draws on the McLeod family and its family-related deaths in three Junes - 1989, 1995 and 1999 - for its story. And the opening section promises much, following Paul McLeod, father of three grown-up sons, to Greece in the summer of 1989, in the wake of his wife's death. Glass, obviously, knows Greece and isn't at pains to show her knowledge. As a result, this section is beautifully underwritten and as sparse as it is touching.
Paul is a man lost in a purgatory of bereavement, self-doubt, and uncertainty. His hopeful and, ultimately, painful flirtation with a young American painter simply adds to a sense of sadness that hurts even to read. However, once Glass moves on to the central part of the triptych, 'Upright', almost everything that has been so quietly and patiently done in the first part of the book is undone.
'Upright' concerns the life of Fenno McLeod, Paul's New York based, gay bookseller son and is as infuriating as it is overwritten. Glass has Scottish connections, but her understanding of life and language in these islands is unconvincing. David McLeod gives a description of his work as a vet to his own brother, who grew up in the countryside, as "All I can think of is 'putting down' and 'going down' - terms of death in my profession" doesn't ring true. A line in a letter left by his father where he writes, "As a favour to me" doesn't ring true for a Scottish newspaper editor who loathes Americanisms. Worse still, what starts as an affectation of Fenno's - his use of brackets for his, often unnecessary, asides - becomes an intrusive frustration; the body of the book is a prairie of redundant parentheses. To add affront to addition, this habit continues into the third section, 'Boys'.
But there are other more substantial and damaging faults in the central section. A hugely important letter from Lil, Fenno's beloved sister-in-law, is delivered by Veronique, another sister-in-law, for whom he has little time. The explanation for this unlikely occurrence is totally unconvincing. Worst of all, the characters, too often, become caricatures.
I longed to care about these people as I had cared about their father, but I couldn't. Things constantly got in the way of feelings, and the moments of tenderness and power that Julia Glass is so obviously capable of writing were lost. The quiet depth, which made the opening of Three Junes so haunting and so important, had disappeared, to be replaced by laden tables of fancy foods and aimless conversations - things, things, unimportant things.
John MacKenna is a novelist. His most recent book is non-fiction: Shackleton - An Irishman in Antarctica, co-written with Jonathan Shackleton and published by Lilliput Press
Three Junes. By Julia Glass. Pantheon Books, 353 pp. $25