Product Description

Julia Glass, author of the award-winning novel Three Junes, tells a vivid tale of longing and loss, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important connections to others. In The Whole World Over, she pays tribute once again to the extraordinary complexities of love.

Greenie Duquette lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her young son. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. At Walter’s restaurant, the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts–heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision, along with events beyond Greenie’s control, will change the course of several lives around her.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36783 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-12
• Released on: 2007-06-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

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.
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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.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
In her second novel, Julia Glass, author of the National Book Award?winning Three Junes (2002), again tells a tale of overlapping lives. While some critics compared Whole World Over to her debut novel and Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, most agree that Glass's latest effort, while still compelling, delivers a less powerful punch. Critics generally praised the fleshed-out characters (including Fenno McLeod from Three Junes), who move to and from New York, New Mexico, Maine, Massachusetts, and California. More debated the details—the use of 9/11 as a literary device and the lavish descriptions of coconut and chocolate cakes, for example. If not as acclaimed as Three Junes, Whole World Over reveals Glass's ample talents.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

No more Manhattanites please
This is the second novel of Julia Glass that I read, and I am disappointed reading about the lives of New Yorkers who have domestic problems. There are more concerns in the world that I would rather learn about other than what Julia Glass' concoctions of coconut cake and torte del cielo-like characters experience and portray. She has glossed over "wild blue" values like fidelity, filial love, and suffering for others that are directed to human beings and not mainly to dogs and animals. It seems like the only genuine affections that are unconditional and pathetically true in this novel are the love for The Bruce, Treehorn, Felicity the parrot, Stan's menagerie of cats, dogs and other animal foundlings. The love for wife, child or parent may just be passing thoughts to the characters that Glass blows. Has she ever heard of conditions of women in far flung places in the world where cooking is a matter of finding scraps of "isaw" (chicken intestines) to sell in the market for poor people? Personally, I would like to know more about chaat or Indian street food and how the poor people eat it without the expense of wining and dining in white table clothed brasseries. I would rather read about real food that is for survival and not for the pleasures of some "guvnoh" in Santa Fe New Mexico. East coast high society feather their artsy vacation nests in this ancient adobe domicile of the aztecs. I picked up only one indigenous food, "sopapillos", that I wanted to know more about.

I tolerated my being sort of a voyeur into the lives of the cosmopolitan New York West Villagers and their gentrified community of chefs, booklovers, gay and lesbian couples, psychiatrists, the uppity interstices of their Celtic origins. But enough is enough. I don't think I can read another novel about these characters whose lives are a blight to a sense of religion, family and meaning of purpose. I know about their lives and now I would shudder to think about what will happen to these folks when they get old and gray, and what kind of values they will pass on to George, Scott's children and Morticia's grandchildren. And did Glass mention that Scott, Walter's nephew was Stanford University bound? Forget about Greenies and Alans, these 21st century adults are just anchorless, without trajectory or purpose-flighty-flakes whose lives I really did not care about as I was reading. Glass is crafty with her words and command of lines in classic and children's literature, aptly quoting Emily Dickinson for the floridly sensual illusions of Saga, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Joan Sweeney and Munro Leaf for the books Greenie read to George. Other than those ventures into her literary stash, I found this book lacking in how "flocks of birds binding the world like ribbon, fly the whole world over but always, no matter what find their way back home." And here, what I mean by home is not just your physical space but the restful joyfulness of belonging to a cause bigger than oneself, and one that will outlast all the terrors and separations we will experience.

A beautiful, subtle story
I have to admit that I put off reading The Whole World Over because I loved Three Junes so much and didn't want to be disappointed. I certainly wasn't. Julia Glass weaves together the stories of her characters seamlessly and creates a beautiful tapestry of their lives. The story is told from several different perspectives but never gets disjointed and I couldn't wait to hear from each character again. A really lovely book.

Disappointed
I had high expectations for this book and was so disappointed. If I hadn't committed to read it for a book club, I never would have finished it. The characters weren't engaging enough to make one care about them,the story dragged, and what's worse,the discriptions of her 'fabulous' desserts kept me wearing a path to the fridge!
Based on this book, I won't bother with the next one.