Julia Glass’s third novel, I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE, is being wonderfully received in the major papers as well as magazines. Here is an excerpt from the Boston Globe review.
Julia Glass’s third novel, “I See You Everywhere,” is an unusually rich, complex story about sisters, a relationship that provides a fertile source of material for innumerable fiction writers, who don’t always do it justice. These two sisters are, as one of them puts it, “as different as white chocolate and seaweed.” The other describes their bond as “a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.”
In Louisa and Clem, Glass has created two convincing human beings who draw the reader into their lives, through love affairs, marriage, divorce, a near-drowning, a terrible accident, a life-threatening disease. Glass, who won the National Book Award with “Three Junes,” has a sharp ear for dialogue and a finely tuned sense of emotional tone. There are some moving passages and some marvelously funny scenes, too.
Louisa is the conventional one. She hopes for marriage and motherhood, pragmatically putting aside her passion for creating pottery for a career as an arts writer and editor. Clement (a.k.a. Clem), four years younger, is daring, reckless, mercurial. Her work as a wildlife biologist takes her to remote places, where she works with endangered animals and jumps restlessly in and out of love affairs.
The sisters take turns narrating their stories, often versions of the same events, in their different voices in alternating episodes that unfold over 25 years, beginning in 1980. Clem, just out of college, has been persuaded by her father to move to Vermont to keep an eye on her 98-year-old aunt Lucy. She finds the elderly woman staving off the specter of death with shopping sprees, and more than willing to spill some long-held family secrets.
Here is the link to the New York Times review of Glass’s third novel.
In her third and most autobiographical novel, “I See You Everywhere,” Julia Glass engages this volatile dynamic head-on, presenting a double portrait of mismatched sisters, Louisa and Clem Jardine, whose lives are intertwined, “like a double helix, two souls coiling round a common axis, joined yet never touching.” Throughout her life, Louisa — the brainy, cautious, urban older sister — simmers with jealousy over her younger sister’s superior vitality, her supercharged love life and her adventurous career in the wilderness, where she works among creatures still wilder than she.
Julia Glass has proven to be one of the strongest, most accomplished writers today. We are always eagerly anticipating her work and are never disappointed. She writes with an honesty and beauty that is a rarity among contemporary literature. I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE is a not to be missed. It is a story that needs to be read in one sitting because it will not let you go and you will begin to see the characters in your own life, if you are a sister or have known sisters, you will identify and appreciate all of the nuances. You will see these sisters everywhere and you will not be disappointed.
