We have re-located in Maine for our last week (“different house” as my granddaughter would say) and are finding it all very peaceful. It is a serene spot with stunning views toward Squirrel Island punctuated only by lapping water sounds and the early morning squawks of a jay. Random sailboats ply the blue waves and a yellow kayak provides a jolt of color.
i have been immersed in And the Dark Sacred Night and have just emerged after several days. A fan of Julia Glass since Three Junes, I think this is her best novel yet. Now I must go back and re-read Junes since some of those characters, Mal, Lucinda, Fenno, and Walter figure prominently here. Glass draws male characters exceedingly well—perhaps it’s because she has several sons and a male partner—and I was fully engaged with and charmed by crusty Jasper. Likewise, she captures 40-something Kit’s diffidence, inertia, timidness and neediness as he reluctantly embarks on a search for his biological father. His wife, Sandra, has thrown him out, in essence, and his first step is visiting Jasper, his sometime stepfather.
Glass captures the tensions, the hesitations, the undertones and the undercurrents in relationships—the what is not said which can be so much more than what actually is. Several families here become entwined—Daphne and Kit, a single mother and son; Jasper, a widower who was then divorced with two sons and a stepson; Zeke and Lucinda, an impaired senator and his aging wife and their daughter and sons; and Fenno and Walter, a couple who nurture through food and compassion and can also rise to the challenge of entertaining 9-year old twins. These are lives that are separate, then entangled, and then untangled, and then finally entwined for the long haul. I found this novel to be rich in substance, tinged with humor and humility and thoroughly engrossing. I loved the writing as well as Glass’s depictions of our all too human foibles and frailties.
I heard Glass read from her previous novel at Book Passage in Marin several years ago and would also recommend that novel, The Widower’s Tale.
