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Andrew Rewand rewand — 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.