Reviewed by Suzanne Baran

Former expert figurative painter Julia Glass received the National book Award for her debut novel Three Junes, an illustration of the lives of several key characters during three different months of June over the duration of a decade.

Glass inaugurates the reader with Scotsman Paul McLeod, the father of three grown sons, newly widowed and on a group tour of the Greek islands as he recalls how he met and married his deceased wife and fathered their family. Glass relies heavily on painting a story with words. The reader is unfamiliar with McLeod's present and more unacquainted with his past and his character and uses vivid descriptions like brushing paint on canvas. She cleverly peppers the book with references to specific artists like Miro, to depict the emotions of McLeod and his memories. She references characters profiting from or presenting different art they've created throughout the novel.

Like a painting, she paints and in this case writes what she knows - the levels and demands placed upon people in similar situations of loss and longing. The reader gets an enhanced portrait of this, and cannot fail to realize or envision anything other than the vast mural or letters Glass composes with aplomb.

In the story's longest section, Glass shows us the universe through Paul's oldest son's, eyes. This is Fenno, a gay man who moved to New York City and owns a quaint bookstore. He learns many lessons about love and loss which spur his growth in unforeseen ways. Fenno is the pronounced rebel, and here's where the book gets juicy and isn't sugarcoated with picturesque details and character portraits. It's the longest and most muscular section of the novel. Fenno wrangles with his brothers as they prepare for their father's funeral. Throughout the preparations of cooking and doing homely things, he retells his friendship with Mal, a snobby music critic who died of AIDS. The reader is almost forced to conclude that Fenno, a detached vagrant with a large inheritance, avoided emotional attachments until Mal entered his life. Fenno failed to acknowledge Mal's love until the death scene, when he began to interact with the world and admit to his feelings. Fenno's perspective isn't as flowery as the rest of the book.

In the third section, Glass reclaims the third-person point-of-view and describes a dinner cooked by Tony, the obnoxious, thinly-drawn playboy who administered blowjobs to Fenno. Fenno, no longer involved with Tony, agrees to come to the dinner. Various non-dimensional and superfluous characters attend the same dinner. Of these guests, the reader encounters Fern last. She, too, has slept with the host, but is now recovering from her husband's accident/suicide. She's an artist and book designer whom Paul met on his trip to Greece several years earlier. Presently, Fern is a young pregnant widow, also living in New York City, who must make sense of her own past and present to be able to move forward in her life. In this novel, hope and truth seem to rear-end in surprising ways, as frequently as car accidents on a slick highway on a rainy California evening.

Glass says about Fern: "Like the character Fern, I actually did have a fellowship to paint in Paris after I graduated from Yale," and "I had always been a good writer, but I was concentrating on the visual arts." While a master at painting characters with all-too careful yet bold brushstrokes, the novel reads like a still painting--stagnant, motionless and vague. Glass fully grasps the concept of character development and the descriptive elements of the book are best, but the dialogue and conflicts of each character are two-dimensional at best and etch stagnant, non-fluid images in the reader's mind.