The Whole World Over (Paperback)

by Julia Glass (Author)
Key Phrases: other charlie, alan wondered, bird prince, The Whole World Over, Uncle Marsden, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker
Greenie Duquette loves her cozy life in the West Village, her work as a pastry chef, and her precocious young son. But she is fed up with her husband, Alan, an underemployed psychotherapist whose once passionate beliefs are ossifying into reflexive bitterness. When, in early 2000, the brash Republican governor of New Mexico offers her a lucrative job, she jumps at it; Alan is free to follow her if he chooses. In Glass's sprawling follow-up to her award-winning novel "Three Junes," a dozen or so characters are plunged into the tumultuous dissatisfactions and challenges of middle age, their paths crossing and recrossing with a pleasing mixture of chance and inevitability. Glass is fascinated by the ways people gamble both with and for their happiness, but her characters are a little too decent, generous, and forgiving. Even as we watch their dramas unfold in the shadow of 9/11, the potential horror of irrevocable choices eludes us.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker - click here to subscribe. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400075769
• ISBN-13: 978-1400075768
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #227,053 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strictly okay, July 31, 2006

By	Gregory Baird (Morristown, NJ) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Whole World Over: A Novel (Hardcover)

As many of the reviewers of this book are, I am a great fan of Julia Glass' first book, "Three Junes", and had eagerly been waiting for her follow-up. I was dismayed to read so many middling reviews of "The Whole World Over," but was determined to give it a try myself. I really wanted to like the book, but a hundred pages in I found myself disappointedly sympathizing with the reviewers on this site who had given up at that point and had no remorse about not continuing. I kept reading out of loyalty to Glass -- and to the fact that I hadn't actually liked the first part of "Three Junes" either, and I wound up loving that novel in the end. Unfortunately, "The Whole World Over" doesn't pick up the way her first book did. The characters just aren't very involving, and their stories don't make you want to find out more about them. They are very grounded and thought-out, but ultimately feel more planned than realistic. There is also a very disjointed narrative structure that awkwardly transitions, in each chapter, from 2000-2001 (when the present-day action is unfolding) to some point in the past of whichever character that chapter is about, and then back to the present. The cast of characters is a little too crowded as well, particularly for the narrative form Ms. Glass has chosen. Storylines are constantly getting put on hold to switch to another one, and since none of them are very interesting it only serves to distance you further from the action. Glass also seems to have developed a taste for cutesy language that feels cloying -- and her efforts to nickname each of her characters becomes grating after a while. She also falls into the trap of over-using the words like, totally, dude, and man in the dialogue of her younger, teen or twenty-something characters. It would be one thing if only one of them spoke that way, but when all three of them do it (Candace/Candy, Scott, and Sonya/Spiderwoman)it just hurts your head. I'm 24 and I have never spoken that way, and most of my friends didn't even speak that way in high school, so it just feels at best like a lazy, cliched way for a writer to try and use a different dialogue technique or, at worst, like the author does not trust her readers to remember that there is an age difference between the characters talking. That is a particular pet peeve of mine when it comes to fiction.

Anyway, I mentioned earlier that I sympathized with the people who gave up on this novel after a hundred pages or so, but I am glad that I stuck with it because Glass does return to glorious form in the last sixty pages or so, when the 9/11 attacks take place. Her coverage of the events of that day could have felt exploitative or overly dramatic but it isn't. At last she stopped cloying and hit upon some genuine emotion! Glass does a remarkable and admirable job of capturing the events of the day and the conflicting feelings that came with it (horror, panic, anger, sadness for those lost and joy for the people who called to say that they were safe). It is the best take on that day that I have read in a fiction book in the years that have followed, and it is just unfortunate that such perceptive observations and genuinely good writing is crammed into the last 60 pages of an otherwise mediocre novel. If there had been more like that I would be able to say that the book is worth recommending, but I can't bring myself to advise anyone to slog through 450 pages of trifle for one brief, heartbreaking moment of genius.

57 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't compare to The Three Junes...., July 4, 2006

By	A. Donati "phantjag" (New York, N.Y. United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Whole World Over: A Novel (Hardcover)

I ADORED The Three Junes and was eagerly waiting for another novel from Ms. Glass but only got halfway through this book. I wanted to keep reading because I still think the author is extremely talented but unfortunately it just didn't capture my interest. Main problems:

A. I didn't find Greenie a very interesting or sympathetic character.
B. Story lumbers along very slowly.
C. I could sense the author WRITING the book as I was reading it which makes it very hard to immerse yourself in the story.
D. There are many different story lines in The Whole World Over and everytime I picked up the book it felt like I was reading a completely different novel -- this disjointed sensation never allowed me to get close to the characters or to enter their world.

I hate to write a bad review because I still think Ms. Glass is a brilliant writer. I highly recommend her first book which was utterly gorgeous and truly magical.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Book, September 7, 2006

By	Loraine Despres (Beverly Hills, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Whole World Over: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved this book. I found the characters rich and compelling. The descriptions are beautiful. It's not a book you want to tear through, but one you want to sit with and savor. What I liked best was the essential decency in all the characters. It's much easier to write a frightning psychopath than to keep the readers interest when describing real people who may hurt one another, but who always care.