The Whole World Over Author:Julia Glass From the author of the beloved novel Three Junes comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four- year- old son, George. Her husband, Alan,... more » seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. It is at Walter's restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie's coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts-and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie's orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made-or has refused to face. Julia Glass is at her best here, weaving a glorious tapestry of lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In The Whole World Over she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love.« less
Glass has succeeded again with many characters and stories that converge into one. This a great book that lived up to the standards she set with The Three Junes.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It was very well-written with varied and detailed characters that were overall likable. The structure was a bit frustrating at times since the story switched perspectives and made forward jumps in time, leaving the reader to wonder about lost story threads for a long while (this was particularly true towards the end). Largely, through, it was basically the story of a marriage. It also had the strange effect of making New York City feel like a small town, with the way the characters' lives all intersected.
I had no trouble at all following the character's in this book. Maybe it's because I can adapt to different techniques of writing..IDk....I thought it was a very good book! Thumbs up to Julia!
I had so much trouble getting into this book. There was just too much going on, too many different characters and stories. I have loved everything else I have read by this author, but did not like this. I didnt like the main character, and found it hard to sympathize with any character in the book.