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Summary
Summary
In this richly detailed novel about the quest for an unknown father, Julia Glass brings new characters together with familiar figures from her first two novels, immersing readers in a panorama that stretches from suburban New Jersey to rural Vermont and ultimately to the tip of Cape Cod.
Kit Noonan is an unemployed art historian with twins to help support and a mortgage to pay and a wife frustrated by his inertia. Raised by a strong-willed, secretive single mother, Kit has never known the identity of his father a mystery that his wife insists he must solve to move forward with his life. Out of desperation, Kit goes to the mountain retreat of his mother s former husband, Jasper, a take-no-prisoners outdoorsman. There, in the midst of a fierce blizzard, Kit and Jasper confront memories of the bittersweet decade when their families were joined. Reluctantly breaking a long-ago promise, Jasper connects Kit with Lucinda and Zeke Burns, who know the answer he s looking for. Readers of Glass s first novel, Three Junes, will recognize Lucinda as the mother of Malachy, the music critic who died of AIDS. In fact, to fully understand the secrets surrounding his paternity, Kit will travel farther still, meeting Fenno McLeod, now in his late fifties, and Fenno s longtime companion, the gregarious Walter Kinderman.
And the Dark Sacred Night is an exquisitely memorable tale about the youthful choices that steer our destinies, the necessity of forgiveness, and the risks we take when we face down the shadows from our past.
From the Hardcover edition. "
Author Notes
Julia Glass was born March 23, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award in 2002. Her latest novel is entitled, The Widower's tale.
She grew up in Lincoln, MA, and graduated from Yale in 1978. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her partner, photographer Dennis Cowley. She has two children and works as a freelance journalist and editor.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
THE LOST OR UNKNOWN parent tantalizes from behind the drape. The child cast off or left behind spins absence into myth. Most of us are given little to imagine about our mothers and fathers; they stand squarely before us on their fallen arches. We know from whom we got our own flat feet. The forsaken child, though, can hope for better, also that a bit of the mystery has been passed on to him, a secret compartment holding an untapped talent, an innate courage, a sensitive nature. And, against the evidence, love may also wait. Kit Noonan, the protagonist of Julia Glass's latest warmhearted novel, "And the Dark Sacred Night," is achy with this particular longing, since his mother has steadfastly refused to provide him with the smallest clue about the identity of his father. It is this blank that fills the frame of Kit's midlife crisis. An art historian in his 40s, he has run off the rails of tenure. With two kids and an exasperated wife, he needs to find if not a spiritual path, at least an actual job. His wife, although not a professional psychologist, confidently diagnoses the root of his inertia as not knowing his paternity and prescribes an existential road trip. So Kit heads north to see if his stepfather, Jasper, knows anything. Jasper is a stock rustic pulled off the "flinty" shelf. He likes his dogs husky (as opposed to one of "those poodle-doodles"), is skeptical of modern salads made of "rich people's weeds," rues that he sees his son and grandkids "once in a polka-dot moon." He is also a deeply decent guy who raised Kit as his own, gave him his name and kept him when Kit's mother, Daphne, left to marry someone new. In spite of this generosity, Kit has fallen out of touch with him. Bloodwise, Jasper is not the real deal. Jasper knows that Kit's father, like Kit's mother, was a musician and that they met as teenagers at a prestigious music camp. And he recalls the family's name. A bit of cyberstalking and Jasper and Kit have the goods. Kit's father, Malachy Burns, was, in his prime, the chief music critic for The New York Times - ambitious and edgy, gay and sexually active during the first assault of AIDS, dead since the late 1980s. Years before that, though, one night at the music camp (a summer that is flashed back to throughout the book), Daphne's stealthy late-night slip into Malachy's bunk provided him a brief moment of heterosexuality. And, of course, as fate would have it. . . . So although Kit has no father to be found, he does have a grandmother who has been waiting for him since she was shut out of his life by Daphne. He also has an unsuspecting family circle. Some of its members might already be known to Glass's readers. A charming aspect of her fiction is that certain characters roam widely through her work. Malachy's mother, Lucinda, and his friend Fenno were first seen in Glass's debut novel, "Three Junes," a National Book Award winner. In this new one, the baton of narrative perspective is passed from Kit to Jasper to Lucinda to Fenno. Everyone in this assembly is related by blood or love or friendship. And they're big on gathering. They also have individual pasts, which divert attention from the fact that not much is happening in the present. The book's large set pieces are family affairs : Thanksgiving dinner, a Cape Cod holiday, a pilgrimage to the music camp where Kit was conceived. Chatter skims along a boilerplate surface. It seems as if breakfast, lunch or dinner is always being readied, often by one or another of the substantial contingent of gay guys in the mix. At Thanksgiving, the reader is even given a seating chart: "Lucinda and Zeke occupy their customary ends of the table. Cyril and Greg sit to either side of Lucinda, Madison and Christina flanking Zeke. Jonathan, who is filling everyone's champagne glass (and this time Lucinda accepts), has a place between Madison and her father." I have to admit I didn't find this particularly helpful. As usual, Glass is deft at description. Many of her images linger for a long while after you read them. Sketching a place where nature still trumps man-made, she positions Jasper in a huge snowstorm that shuts everything down: "Exactly as he turns back to the house, the lights go out. Every pane goes black, leaving a mosaic of afterburn on his field of vision." Catching a tiny moment of parenthood, she has Kit notice that his son has grown stockier than his twin sister: "His body has begun to look distinctly male in its dialogue with the ground." As it turns out, the Malachy that Kit pieces together from snapshots and memories was snarky, self-involved, intent on making an impression. One old photograph has him lounging in a tuxedo, a red parrot on his shoulder. "He will always be, to some extent, a blur - from so many angles, his image remains obstinately shadowed, hopelessly smudged - but he is no longer a phantom. And there are so many shapes that phantom might have taken (a lascivious older man, a drunken acquaintance in a bar, a violent stranger) that it decidedly didn't." When Kit holds a photo of Malachy next to his face in the mirror, it's hard to find the resemblance. "But in this picture Malachy is younger than Kit; he cannot be anything but younger. What does it mean to discover your father when you are older than he would ever be? Kit worries that he is unable to feel sad enough. Too often now, he wonders what it is he should feel." THE READER MAY have a similar reaction, never quite believing in these people or in what links them to one another. Part of this can be attributed to a loose authorial grip on character management. Like a teacher on a field trip, shooing along too many students and their dropped lunch bags and lost mittens, Glass has her hands full keeping everyone on the page, let alone making significant connections among them. And in truth, significant connection rarely happens at family gatherings. These get-togethers really serve to find references in the past, update the present and smoke pipe dreams for the next generation. "And the Dark Sacred Night" echoes a culture that has taken perhaps too many photos of itself near bodies of water, grouped around roasted birds, amid carpets full of spent wrapping paper, flanking someone in a mortar board - a pre-formatted, self-congratulatory notion of family. What Glass doesn't get at is the monster cage match - the raw power of love, ignition of nerves, pure blue flame of hatred each of us can feel for this small collection of others we never asked for and yet are bound to. 'What does it mean to discover your father when you are older than he would ever be?' CAROL ANSHAW'S most recent novel is "Carry the One."
Library Journal Review
Glass (Three Junes) hits another home run with this story of Kit Noonan, a middle-aged man at a turning point in his life. He is currently unemployed and at the insistence of his wife goes in search of the father he never met. Kit's mother raised him alone and has refused to tell him his father's name. With the help of his stepfather, Kit finds his paternal grandmother and reunites with his father's family. This is a story about family secrets and the importance of knowing where you come from. The characters are well drawn, and the plot is engaging and believable. Mark Deakins's narration is excellent, except for a few times when the plot shifts gears and it's hard to follow who is telling the story. Verdict For popular collections. ["Examining complicated family relationships among several families whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways, this warm and engaging story about what it means to be a father will appeal to most readers," read the review of the Pantheon hc, LJ 2/1/14.]-Michele Lauer-Bader, formerly with Half Hollow Hills Community Lib., Dix Hills, NY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
She saw him through the trees, and she almost turned around. In just eight days, she had come to believe that this wedge of shore, tumbled rock enclosed by thorny juniper and stunted saplings (but lit by the tilting sun at the western side of the lake) was her secret. Each afternoon, it became her refuge--just one brief measure, a piacere, of solitude--from another attenuated day of rehearse, practice, and practice even more; of master classes and Popper études, hour after hour of Saint-Saëns and Debussy; of walking over plush lawns, passing adults who spoke zealously, even angrily, in German and Russian; of waking and going to sleep in a room shared with three other girls. Not that this life wasn't precisely, incandescently, what she had craved, dreamed about, most of all worked for. How funny that all this discipline and deprivation rewarded Daphne with the headiest freedom she had ever known: freedom, to begin with, from her mother's vigilance and her brother's condescension, from another summer mixing paints and copying keys in her father's hardware store. During Afternoon Rest, some campers retreated to their rooms to write letters or take naps. When the rooms were too hot to stand, they spread beach towels under the estate's monumental trees--or on the sliver of sandy beach. Others loitered at Le Manoir, though nobody called it that. They called it HQ. There was a games lounge with a moth-eaten billiards table; you could play Monopoly, backgammon, chess. They took turns using the pay phones on the porch. But Daphne came here: sometimes just to sit, sometimes read, more often to gaze at the water and let herself wonder at . . . well, at the hereness of here. To reassure herself that it was real. To be alone. Except that today she wasn't. Malachy, first flute, sat on her favorite rock facing the lake. She recognized him right away, because just that day, standing behind him in the lunch line, she happened to notice the distinctive swallowtail of his tame brown hair as it forked to either side of his narrow neck. (His close haircut seemed almost affected; most of the boys had mussed-up manes, Paul McCartney hair.) His posture, typical of flautists, was upright, attentive. He wore his T-shirts tucked into the belted waist of loose khaki shorts. And like his hair, his shirts were defiantly square: no slogans, tie-dyed sunbursts, silhouettes of shaggy rock stars, or sly allusions to other music camps. That day his T-shirt was orange. "What, not practicing?" she said. He did not jump, nor did he stand. Waiting till she stood beside him, he looked up and said, "If it isn't the swan herself, come to test the waters." Daphne's swimsuit was a navy-blue one-piece chosen by her mother. She wore shorts as well, book and towel clasped against her chest, yet she blushed. "You don't suppose," he said, "that Generalissima has spies in these woods? I've heard there's a flogging room in the cellar of HQ." Daphne laughed. "Not kidding," he said. "Yes you are." Malachy's prim expression broke. "Pretty martial around here, don't you think? And can you believe all the Iron Curtain accents?" "What did you expect, the cast of Captain Kangaroo ?" This made him laugh. "Maybe Hogan's Heroes ." "You mean, we should dig a tunnel and escape?" "We could steal those little mallets Dorian uses to play his glockenspiel." Malachy had swiveled to face her. He sat cross-legged, his calves pale and sparsely freckled, his bare feet long and bony. He shaded his eyes. "Sit, or I'll go blind. And then I won't be able to see my music, and my brilliant symphonic career will flash before my irradiated eyeballs." She unrolled her towel and sat, facing him. He had no book or other obvious diversion. Was he there to meet someone? What a perfect place for a private meeting. "So are you aware," said Malachy, "that Rhonda would pay me a nice reward to drown you here and now?" Daphne laughed nervously. She and Malachy played together in Chamber One; Rhonda was her counterpart, a cellist in Chamber Two. Openly and cheerfully competitive, she'd announced at their first dinner that anyone assigned the swan solo in the Saint-Saëns was clearly the director's pet. (Daphne might say the same of Malachy, chosen to play "Volière.") "I just got lucky," said Daphne. "No false modesty allowed," said Malachy. "They decided our parts based on our auditions. Nothing here happens by accident. You know that." "I guess." She didn't like talking about the ranking they all deplored yet knew had to be a part of their lives forever if they wanted to succeed. "So are you from one of those musical families where everybody plays something different?" He smirked. "Like the Jackson Five? There's a picture to savor. No, I'm it. The one who got whatever genetic mutation makes our subspecies behave the way we do. My brother and sister see me as the weirdo. The family fruitcake. Which is a huge relief to them. They get to be the normal ones." "So maybe I've got it, too. The mutation. Mom plays piano, but Christmas carols. Hymns. She subs for the church organist. Actually, I'm not sure how I got into this place." "Give it up, Swan. They've got their eye on you here. I saw our taskmistress smile yesterday in the middle of your solo. For about a tenth of a second. I didn't think she had those muscles in her cheeks." Natalya Skovoroda, the conductor of Chamber One, was Ukrainian, with a dense, porridgelike accent. Her face--a prime object, morning after morning, of Daphne's most devoted concentration--was as round and pale as a dinner plate, mesmerizingly smooth for someone who scowled so much. Beneath that scowl, Daphne and her fellow musicians had grown close to one another quickly, like a band of miscellaneous hostages. Malachy leaned toward Daphne. "You have that cello stripped naked." "Is that a compliment?" Because he sat almost directly behind her during morning rehearsal, she hardly ever saw his face. It was long and serious, his eyes a frosty blue that made him look all-seeing, older in a way that was spooky but cool. Across his nose--narrow like the rest of him--a scant dash of freckles stood out sharply, distinct as granules of pepper. A speedboat careened raucously past, skimming the water, passengers shrieking as it bounced up and down. For a moment, they let it capture their attention. Daphne started to stand up. "I should go wait for a phone. Haven't called home in a couple of days." "No," he said. "You should stay and listen to one of my limericks." "Limericks?" "I'm working on a suite of limericks about our wardens." Daphne shifted on her towel. "Well. Sure." Malachy cleared his throat and sat up even straighter. He cocked his head at a dramatic angle toward the lake, as if posing for a portrait. A Soviet chick named Nah-tail-ya Said, "Eef you play flat, I veel flail ya, But come to my room Vare I'll bare my bazoom. Maybe let you peek at holy grail-ya." Blood rushed to Daphne's face. She felt both thrilled and appalled. He turned to her, widened his eyes. "Svahn? May vee haff your creeteek?" She covered her mouth, trying to repress the spasms of laughter. "Oh my gosh, that is so . . . obscene!" "Uh-oh. I've shocked you. See, I told you I'm a weirdo." "Oh my God." "Here, I'll give you something just a bit tamer. Appetizer to next week's celebrity recital." Again he struck his pose. There once was a diva named Esme With a lengthy and worldly résumé. Listed way at the end Was her tendency to bend Quite far over and trill, "Yes you may." "You are horrid!" Daphne cried. But she couldn't stop laughing. Excerpted from And the Dark Sacred Night by Julia Glass All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.