I See You Everywhere [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: Julia Glass, New York, Rhode Island (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

SignatureReviewed by Lydia MilletThe fictional palate of Julia Glass, bestselling author of 2002's Three Junes, is one of dog-breeding women and foxhunts, tony Manhattan galleries and boutiques, European travel and haute-cuisine chefs. In common with Rebecca Wells's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood franchise, Glass's third novel, I See You Everywhere, has female bonding among the landed gentry, a focus on relationships, and devil-may-care, enigmatically charming women of great romantic allure. Like Three Junes, the novel is a series of vignettes across the years, in this instance from the points of view of two sisters with different personalities. Louisa, the elder, is the steady sister on the lookout for love, while Clem is the younger sister, an adventuring, restless spirit with an unfortunate habit of chewing men up and spitting them out. Their parents, too, resemble those in Three Junes: the mother is obsessed with raising and training expensive dogs on a country estate (this time in Rhode Island instead of Scotland); their father is a good-natured, kindly soul who plays second fiddle to a powerful wife. Louisa, not unlike Glass herself, is an urban woman who inhabits the New York art world and moves from making art (pottery) to writing; Clem, being a wilder sort, has a passion for wild animals and moves around the remoter reaches of the continent as an itinerant biologist to do contract work with charismatic fauna ranging from seals to grizzly bears. It's not entirely clear how the sisters relate to each other's livelihoods; Clem seems largely uninterested in art, whereas Louisa alternates between lavishly praising her sister's work to save animals as heroic and referring to polar bears, in 2005, as like Al Gore... suddenly all the alarmist rage. City and country mouse have a wary, competitive, sometimes antagonistic relationship grounded in affection; they occasionally steal each other's boyfriends, but are usually there for each other in times of need, up to and including possible drowning, maiming and cancer. Both cook well, though Louisa is the true gourmet. Clem is better in the sack, at least if we take her word for it: as she says in a letter—reminding us, perhaps inadvertently, of the piña colada song—what she likes most in life are laughter, sex, champagne and sunsets. The sisters do have music in common: though both white, they listen almost exclusively to music by black performers, from Billie Holiday to Bob Marley.I See You Everywhere has a bourgeois, chick lit sensibility, minus the proud vacuousness of the Bushnell set and plus a somewhat unexpected, sad vanishing act by one of the protagonists. It should prove an engaging and intelligent, though not literary, page-turner for sisters who like to revel in sisterhood.Lydia Millet's most recent novel isHow the Dead Dream(Counterpoint).
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From The New Yorker

This quietly powerful family history is the author�s third novel; her d�but, �Three Junes,� won the National Book Award. At the center of the story are two sisters: Louisa is four years older than Clement, and �also nearly four inches shorter and about four decades more full of opinions.� Over the course of twenty-five years, the two grow up, fall in love with startling frequency, and confront challenges that reveal the impossibility of truly knowing another person, even a sibling. At first, the sisters seem dangerously close to stereotypes�the elder bookish and reserved, the younger boisterous and boy-crazy�but the book�s almost Biblical scope does not come at the expense of strikingly sensual detail. Glass sees the bond of sisterhood as �a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.�
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (October 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422757
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422751
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #159,151 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars White Chocolate and Seaweed, October 2, 2008

By	Mallory Smith (Tallahassee, Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This is a wonderful story about two sisters, Louisa and Clement, who are "as different as white chocolate and seaweed. They were born four years apart. Louise is the older and she is as steady as a rock. She tries to do what's right and strives to make a good impression. Clem, on the other hand, is a wandering soul. She is an outgoing person who makes friends easily. Men like her. She has a kind of wildness about her. Louisa has always kind of resented Clem.

The girls were raised by their dog raising mother, who reminded me a bit of the dog raising mother in THREE JUNES. Their father let mom run the show. As children the girls were very competitive. It seems they were always in some kind of power struggle.

Louisa marries and lives in New York, while Clem, who becomes a wildlife biologist, wanders from here to there, eventually settling in the Rocky Mountains. They seem to grow closer together as they move farther away from each other.

The chapters in this story alternate from each sister's point of view and Julia Glass really gives her readers an insight into their character. There is a bond between sisters and this book shows how strong it is, stronger than tragedy and cancer. This book warmed my heart and made me feel good, but it disturbed me too. Why that is, I really don't know, but I do know this, I can't recommend I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE, or any book written by Julia Glass highly enough.

46 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The characters are so unsympathetic., October 3, 2008

By	Melanchthon "melanchthon" (USA) - See all my reviews

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There is a family--two sisters who don't get along very well and their well-meaning but somewhat eccentric parents. There are many boyfriends and hangerson and an eccentric aunt who dies quickly. The sisters don't get along with each other and then a tragedy occurs and the family has to cope. This is the stuff of dozens of novels, and I usually like the genre, but this book left me almost completely cold. By about page 40 I despised both of the protagonists, from whose alternating viewpoint the book is written. So the tragedy left me unmoved, because I had learned to dislike the characters, and I had little interest in finding out how the plot resolved. I think that the "family problem" novel needs to have at least one person with whom one can identify or for whom one feels at least a little liking, but these women were egotistical and erratic and treated each other and their family poorly. I resented the time I spent with them.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mix of blemish and brilliance, September 29, 2008

By	switterbug "laughingwild" (Austin, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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Julia Glass has flair for what Flaubert called the mot juste, the exquisitely right expression or word. She spins straw into gold with wise witticisms, well-crafted metaphors, and meaningful meditations on life. Her language has a layered intelligence; her inner dialogue reverberates and resounds, mirrors and bounces. As she demonstrated in a previous novel, The Whole World Over, Glass is capable of handling a versatile range of characters in a balanced, compelling story. She is also a National Book Award winner for Three Junes (which I have not yet read). However, in this latest novel, her talents did not coalesce--the whole was not a sum of its parts.

Although her insights were just as evident as ever, the story suffered from constriction and a one-note tone for most of the narrative. Yet, it is Glass' ability to conjure ripe phrases with robust philosophizing that kept me intermittently riveted through to the end of the novel. I was glad that I finished it, because she redeemed much of the sagging story in the final chapter.

In this double narrative of well-bred Rhode Island sisters, she spans twenty-five years (1980-2005) of their adult lives. She depicts the connections, disconnections, and missed connections to each other and to their own ideas of self in isolation and in relation to others.

Written in a quasi-diarized style, Glass alternates between older sister Louisa, who has more conventional aspirations, and Clem, her buccaneer sister. Louisa is a Harvard grad art editor and self-proclaimed failed potter desiring true love, babies, and recognition. Wily Clem, a wildlife scientist, eschews love and seeks sexual adventures as she travels to remote areas of the country studying fish, whales, birds, and bears.

Lousia and Clem were engaging, clever, provocative, and sympathetic, but the author's tone and dialogue did not adequately provide distinction of the two narrative voices. Although the tone is fittingly ironic when the sisters engaged in wry self-reflection, it eventually became overindulgent and tedious. Instead of two narrators, it felt like one narrator pretending to be two people. This led to confusion when I began a chapter or new section of narrative. We know Clem and Louisa by what they did and how they lived and thought, but I had to rely on information that was often teased out too cagily in order to know which character was speaking. The necessary shades and contours of separate voices were missing. Even in context, the voices were often difficult to identify.

The progression of events drifted, sometimes aimlessly or messily. After some juicy inner dialogue, for instance, the narrative would often become stilted and expository. During these expository phases, the story went flat, the center did not hold. The author began telling rather than showing, displaying rather than revealing. Long passages of wildlife descriptions, for instance, did not feel fluidly connected to the story--it seemed like I was reading from National Geographic cut and pasted into the scene. It was artificial, like Glass was straining for a device in order to move events along. Dramatic tension inevitably snared--the narrative would gather momentum, offer a dramatic pause and wilt. The characters' thoughts stayed elastic but the story itself was stiff and narrowly executed. The important events were explained, often offhandedly, in a desultory tone.

Clem, Louisa, an eccentric Aunt Lucy and a panic-driven mother were the only characters with buoyancy. The men in their lives, including their father, did not resonate. They existed, I felt, as contrivances. There was another character, a male employee of their mother, who entered with a blaze of comic zaniness and provided a dramatic surge for the sisters. However, he just as quickly disappeared with an ambiguous resolution. I felt manipulated, as if he were only there to provide counterpoint to Louisa and Clem--don't get attached, he is going away, no longer useful.

The climax also felt synthetic. I do not want to give spoilers, so I can only describe my response. It felt like the author decided to assault the consistency of character in order to make a point about the elusiveness of human nature and the enigma of the human condition. I came to the conclusion that she never intended the characters to have a life of their own beyond the decisions she made prior to putting pen to paper. In her vision to place them outside the box, she paradoxically boxed them in.

The anti-climax was thoughtful and redeemed the manufactured denouement. The author pondered the climactic events through character and plot, giving the reader a rest from endless insouciance. The mood was suitably contemplative and compassionate, and when I finished the last sentence, I closed the book with a piece of my heart pierced and open.