| Review: Julia Glass, The Three Junes |
| The Three Junes by Julia
Glass is a tough read. And considering I picked the book up and set
it down at least ten times before I finally made it all the way through,
the very existence of this review is a small miracle. At one point, I actually decided to return the book with a short, prepared announcement, “I can’t do this,” I was going to say, “the book is unreadable.” But then, wanting to figure out exactly why the book was unreadable grabbed hold, and I continued on long enough to discover its readable part, which begins somewhere around page one hundred. The problem is, it only finds its groove for about 165 pages after that. Then it becomes not only a tough read again, but a puzzling one. The Three Junes is a strange fictional composition divided into three sections: Collies, Upright, and Boys. Collies is mainly concerned with…collies, the kind that herd Scottish sheep. As well as two people who meet, have three sons, and die, all in Scotland, and more or less all in three chapters. The characters are dull, the story is dull and overwritten, and Glass seems smitten with asides to the reader which actually come with parentheses— sometimes several to a page—as though a character’s introspecting constantly requires emphasis and explanation. If you can still bear to hold the thing in your hands through all this, the second section, Upright, is where the real story begins, though even this section gets off to a slow start for about forty pages. And borrowing a trick from Ms. Glass… (that’s a lot to expect of a reader.) Still, it’s almost worth the wait (though skipping to it directly would leave one with the same experience and a better taste in the mouth), because the subject— homosexuality, Aids, love, death, and caring is handled with a masterful touch. The point-of-view character in this section, Fenno, is satisfyingly and convincingly complex. Hard to like, he manages to elicit a degree of respect tinged with empathy. And the characters that surround him are unique and convincing, as well. The third section, Boys, is simply confounding. Who the hell is Fern? I kept wondering. And it wasn’t until several days after I’d finished the book that someone told me. “Oh, one of the girls introduced in the first three chapters of Collies?” I said, “That girl?” Hmmph. Inattentive reading, you say? Perhaps. But, remember, Fern was 230 pages ago. And those first hundred pages were really quite painful to slog through. So I don’t think I can really be blamed for forgetting them (and Fern, too.) Although there was something significant to admire in The Three Junes, it felt too much like something quilted together (and awkwardly, too)—consisting of a beginning that never went anywhere and should have been discarded after it produced one character large enough to carry a real novel, a satisfying middle, and a manipulated ending that was necessary only to justify that odd beginning. To my mind, a prizewinning novel needs to be more than a fictional biography, more than a story of what people do to and for each other. It needs to resonate outside itself—some truth needs to be told, some question asked, some discovery made. The Three Junes lacks such resonance. And I know that it was a National Book Award winner. I just don’t know why.
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