THREE JUNES
By Julia Glass
Paperback
353 pp. New York:
Anchor Books. $14.

Reviewed by Christine Caya

The novel Three Junes sweeps across time and continents under the guidance of Julia Glass’s masterful prose. Spanning more than a decade, Glass introduces readers to the legacy of love and loss that carry the McLeod family through the tumultuous time that was the close of the twentieth century. From their homeland of Scotland to their wanderings in Greece, France, and New York, the McLeods discover how their misconstrued views of the past have created a fractured familial bond in the present that pushes the limits of how much “tradition” alone can keep a family together.

Sectioned into three parts, the first, “Collies 1989” (winner of the 1999 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella), follows the patriarch of the McLeod family, Paul McLeod. After the recent death of his wife, Paul ventures to Greece to gain some perspective on the rest of his life and his relationship with his three sons. Paul discovers companionship in varying degrees from a smooth talking tour guide, a middle-aged, optimistic spinster, and a young American girl whose art and life act as a frame for not only Three Junes but the fragile relationship between Paul and his eldest son, Fenno.

“Upright 1995” takes readers into the jaded and yet rather tender voice of Fenno as he returns home for his father’s funeral. Fenno struggles with balancing his American life with his Scottish roots and coming to terms with the way his immediate family, alive and dead, have dealt with his homosexuality. Glass explores the platonic and erotic that is held hostage under the blanket of AIDS in a New York full of music critics, socialites, and self-made entrepreneurs. With death always at hand and often keeping love at bay, Fenno wrestles with a childhood of structure and order where survival in adulthood will ultimately require an emotional surrender.

Finally, in “Boys 1999,” Glass comes full circle, and the reader is allowed into the mind of an unmarried, pregnant woman named Fern whose journeys of the heart and world explore just how fragile and intertwined lives can be. Like Fenno, she must decide whether or not to surrender herself to another, a task which given her past relationships freezes her with fear.

Three Junes explores how incidents and indiscretions of the past can be lurking in the background, lingering in characters’ lives like the smell of crushed lavender, always present and in the case of the McLeods, not necessarily insurmountable. In her characters, Glass explores a myriad of life’s most often asked questions with such compassion and skill that there is no such thing as a simple answer, and rightly so. How do you love someone you know is dying? How do you forgive a spouse for adultery? Ultimately, how do you not love someone who is just as fallible and human as you?

Julia Glass has won three Nelson Algren Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award, as well as the 2000 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing. Three Junes was awarded the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction. She is a freelance journalist and editor who lives with her family in New York City. 

 

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