Review

The Whole World Over
Julia Glass
Pantheon; 528pp

In her second rich, subtle novel, Glass reveals how the past impinges on the present, and how small incidents of fate and chance determine the future.
Greenie Duquette has a small bakery in Manhattan’s West Village that supplies pastries to restaurants, including that of her genial gay friend Walter.
When Walter recommends Greenie to the governor of New Mexico, she seizes the chance to become the Southwesterner’s pastry chef and to take a break from her marriage to Alan Glazier, a psychiatrist with hidden issues.
Taking their four-year-old son, George, with her, Greenie leaves for New Mexico, while figures from her and Alan’s pasts challenge their already strained marriage.
Their lives intersect with those of such fully dimensional secondary characters as Fenno McLeod, the gay bookseller from Three Junes; Saga, a 30-something woman who lost her memory in an accident; and Saga’s Uncle Marsden, a Yale ecologist who takes care of her.
While this work is less emotionally gripping than Three Junes, Glass brings the same assured narrative drive and engaging prose to this exploration of the quest for love and its tests-absence, doubt, infidelity, guilt and loss.