Three Junes
by Julia Glass
Summary
Three Junes, three panels, one Scottish family. In the first, June 1989, Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher just widowed, drifts through a package tour of Greece, grieving Maureen, the vivid, difficult wife the reader meets in flashback, collie kennels and all, and finding himself gently drawn to Fern, a young American painter. In the second and longest, June 1995, his eldest son Fenno, a gay Scot transplanted to Manhattan where he runs a bookshop, comes home for Paul's funeral and takes over the novel: his guarded heart, his brothers and their wives and their pointed fertility arrangements, and behind him the New York years the reader now receives whole, the AIDS epidemic moving through his circle, his beloved friend Malachy, a waspish music critic, dying by inches, and Fenno holding himself one step back from every love on offer. In the third, June 1999, Fern reappears, pregnant and widowed, sharing a Long Island house with a man who links her, unknowingly, to the McLeods, and the triptych quietly closes its hinges.
Threaded through all three panels is Tony, a nomadic photographer entangled with Fern and with Fenno both, the kind of connective character a triptych needs and life occasionally supplies. Glass builds the other connections the way life does, through objects, dogs, letters and misunderstandings that surface years later in other people's houses, and the book's pleasure is that patience: nothing is forced, everything eventually touches.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, humane and unhurried.
Best for readers who want family fiction with the craft of linked stories, and the AIDS years held inside an ordinary family's weather rather than foregrounded as history.
Historical Context & Significance
Three Junes won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2002, and it was the year's genuine surprise: a first novel by a forty six year old former painter and magazine copy editor, published without fanfare Julia Glass became the era's favourite example of the late blooming debut, and the win moved the book onto the bestseller lists on its own.
The novel grew from a prize winning novella, Collies, which became the Greek first panel, and Glass has kept faith with its people since: Fenno and others recur in her later books, The Whole World Over and And the Dark Sacred Night, a connected human comedy in the McDermott rather than the Balzac key.
Its treatment of the AIDS epidemic, absorbed into one reticent man's history rather than dramatised head on, has worn particularly well, and the book remains a fixture of book club lists, the quiet kind of prize winner that readers hand each other rather than argue about.