In 2002, Julia Glass won the National Book Award for Three Junes, a rare accomplishment for a debut novel. Reading that book twelve years later, it feels very much of its time, its kin consisting of other early-aughts award-winners that plumbed family strife with a genealogist’s precision (e.g., The Corrections, Empire Falls, Middlesex). But Three Junes—which focuses on the McLeod family and its gay eldest son, Fenno—stands out, still, for its tension, which doesn’t so much build as uncoil, and its triptych structure, which forges surprising connections between major characters. Furthermore, Three Junes contains the marvelous character of Malachy “Mal” Burns, who demonstrates wit and bravado while dying from AIDS. A successful music critic, Mal has a bon mot for every occasion, including this gem regarding the responsibilities of a critic writing a bad review: “If I write a rave, I can do it stone drunk on a dance floor. But cruelty requires astute respect.”
Glass’ new novel, And the Dark Sacred Night, continues the story started in Three Junes, but, sadly, I cannot write this review “stone drunk on a dance floor.” This book isn’t so much bad—such a dismissive word could never be used to describe prose as pristine as Glass’—as it is underwhelming and misguided, telling a story that feels small, and sometimes even invisible. It strives to be what Marilynne Robinson’s Home was to Gilead—a look at familiar characters and situations through a different set of eyes—but Sacred Night feels like neither a sequel nor a companion to Three Junes. At times, it feels simply like a 416-page epilogue.
This time, Glass’ central character—Kit Noonan—lacks the wit and energy of Fenno and Mal. Kit is a husband, father of twins, and former professor of art history, now unemployed, struggling even to nail down adjunct work (a minor character in Three Junes named Jonah also had this problem). Kit has never known the identity of his father, and Kit’s wife suggests that perhaps finding the truth will shake him from his slump. I’m not sure I understand her logic, but this becomes the ignition for Kit’s journey to unlock the secret his mother has kept for decades.
But ignore my overheated plot description: Glass makes an admirable effort to keep her potential soap opera from tipping into melodrama—especially since the reader has a pretty good idea about who Kit’s father is way before Kit himself does, leaving little room for shocking reveals. In fact, Sacred Night is barely even about Kit’s search, and of the novel’s five chapters, only two of them are told from Kit’s point-of-view. The other three chapters focus on characters that Kit visits during his journey; these chapters contain minimal front-story, diving instead into memories (Glass rarely gets through a scene without digressions into the past). This leads to a novel that feels curiously inert: Kit is the only character with a strong objective driving the story, yet Glass keeps running from it. I understand her urge to steer away from “over-plotting,” but, instead, she structures her novel around a series of gatherings, juggling sometimes a dozen characters at a time. Glass occasionally gets so carried away weaving together all these names and histories of friends and extended families that she neglects to create conflict. For instance, I spent the entire novel anticipating a confrontation between two characters named Lucinda and Daphne (Kit’s mother), only to eventually come upon them sitting next to one other, “each absorbed in her book.” (Their argument on the next page proves brief, and resolves easily.)
Part of Glass’ problem is her choice in point of view characters. Just as the disparate points-of-view in Three Junes were organized around Fenno McLeod, the points-of-view in Sacred Night are organized around Malachy Burns, who [SPOILER ALERT] turns out to be Kit’s father. The events play out through the eyes of people obsessed with the dead Mal: his mother, Lucinda; Fenno, whose friendship with Mal formed Three Junes’ backbone; and Kit, obsessed with Mal (i.e., his father) even before he knows his name. This allows Glass to circle themes and characters left over from her earlier, great novel, but her handling of the familiar feels, well, familiar, a writer running from what scares her, settling instead into comfortable rhythms. Sacred Night feels pleasant enough, but it takes few risks and, therefore, lacks the sting of Three Junes.
In fact, the strongest of Sacred Night’s five chapters is the one that has nothing to do with Three June characters—the one in which Kit visits Jasper, his mother’s ex-husband and, in some ways, Kit’s ex-dad. Jasper lives alone (except for his dogs) in a cabin in Vermont and, prior to Kit’s visit, hadn’t seen his former son-in-law in years. What follows in this chapter is a sensitive portrait of two men trying to get to know one another while struggling with the knowledge that there’s not much time left to cross the gulf between them—especially not when Kit keeps chasing his “real” father into the past. And like Kit, Glass too chases other characters into the past, even though Jasper provides the singular heart of the novel—the character I wish she would’ve stayed with longer. And based on the ending of And the Dark Sacred Night—which finally circles back, rather sweetly, rather profoundly, to the idea of fatherhood—I suspect Glass might agree with me.
