Books & Poetry

Greenie Duquette lives the New York life. As a confectioner she provides her soignée cakes and pies to the best Greenwich Village restaurants. However, as a mother and a wife she is lacking some crucial ingredients. When the governor of New Mexico discovers her ‘knockout punch’ of a coconut cake on an official visit to New York, he offers Greenie a position as his personal chef in the State mansion. She takes the decision to put her life on hold. With her young son in hand, she leaves a stale marriage behind and moves to Santa Fe.

Author Julia Glass won America’s National Book Award in 2002 for her first novel, ‘Three Junes’. Her second frames the internal lives of four characters – each trying to find his way, each in search of small ‘cosmic mercies’. Walter, a gay man, owns a successful restaurant in the Village but runs his own love life less efficiently. Alan, Greenie’s comely psychotherapist husband, walks through his depression with slow purpose. Saga, the most intriguing character of the batch, is a young woman who blankly drifts through daily life (‘meek as milk’) after a freak head injury impairs her; the descriptions of her attempts to recall words by colour and sensation are affecting.

Glass sets these lives in motion, but not before spending too much time developing slightly smug Greenie. As the narrative broadens we can begin to understand Alan’s apathy. Why does he allow her to leave their cosy brownstone existence and uproot his son simply in order to perfect an avocado key lime pie thousands of miles away in the governor’s shiny kitchen? This portrait of a dried-out marriage – the fatigue wrought by career-building, the advent of children and the calluses of ingrown emotion – is sharply drawn.

It will only take 9/11 to sort them all out. The description of the attack makes for resonant writing. When the apocalypse hits, any pretence of internal control collapses and the ‘unstoppable forces’ take over. Perhaps Greenie is right – life can be like mastering a cake recipe, a ‘history of countless errors overcome’. Finishing the book is like leaving behind a little neighbourhood of the mind, full of open doors and closed doors, the imperfect and the kind – but a place to which everyone is trying to find his way home.