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Summary
Summary
In a historic farmhouse outside Boston, seventy-year-old Percy Darling is settling happily into retirement: reading novels, watching old movies, and swimming naked in his pond. His routines are disrupted, however, when he is persuaded to let a locally beloved preschool take over his barn. As Percy sees his rural refuge overrun by children, parents, and teachers, he must reexamine the solitary life he has made in the three decades since the sudden death of his wife. No longer can he remain aloof from his community, his two grown daughters, or, to his shock, the precarious joy of falling in love.
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One relationship Percy treasures is the bond with his oldest grandchild, Robert, a premed student at Harvard. Robert has long assumed he will follow in the footsteps of his mother, a prominent physician, but he begins to question his ambitions when confronted by a charismatic roommate who preaches--and begins to practice--an extreme form of ecological activism, targeting Boston's most affluent suburbs.
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Meanwhile, two other men become fatefully involved with Percy and Robert: Ira, a gay teacher at the preschool, and Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener who works for Percy's neighbor, each one striving to overcome a sense of personal exile. Choices made by all four men, as well as by the women around them, collide forcefully on one lovely spring evening, upending everyone's lives, but none more radically than Percy's.
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With equal parts affection and satire, Julia Glass spins a captivating tale about the loyalties, rivalries, and secrets of a very particular family. Yet again, she plumbs the human heart brilliantly, dramatically, and movingly.
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 (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Percy Darling, 70, the narrator of Glass's fourth novel, takes comfort in certitudes: he will never leave his historic suburban Boston house, he is done with love (still guilty about his wife's death 30 years ago), and his beloved grandson Robert, a Harvard senior, will do credit to the family name. But Glass (Three Junes) spins a beautifully paced, keenly observed story in which certainties give way to surprising reversals of fortune. Percy is an opinionated, cantankerous, newly retired Harvard librarian and nobody's "darling," who decides to lease his barn to a local preschool, mainly to give his daughter Clover, who has abandoned her husband and children in New York, a job. Percy's other daughter is a workaholic oncologist in Boston who becomes important to a young mother at the school with whom Percy, to his vast surprise, establishes a romantic relationship. Meanwhile, Percy's grandson, Robert, falls in with an ecoterrorist group. Glass handles the coalescing plot elements with astute insights into the complexity of family relationships, the gulf between social classes, and our modern culture of excess to create a dramatic, thought-provoking, and immensely satisfying novel. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Glass' fourth novel is a capacious family drama with as many brimming rooms and secret nooks and crannies as the historic Massachusetts home of Percy Darling, an acerbic patriarch, penitential widower, and former librarian at Harvard's Widener Library. Percy's coveted property includes a large pond and a spacious old barn, once his late wife's dance studio, now an upscale preschool. A mischievous and erudite curmudgeon, Percy only agrees to this intrusion in the hope that his floundering daughter, Clover, will finally secure a job that makes her happy. Not that she'll ever catch up to her sister, a legendary oncologist. Masterfully omniscient and spellbinding, National Book Award winner Glass creates glimmering descriptions, escalating conflicts, and intriguing characters, such as Percy's oldest grandson, Robert, a premed student at Harvard, and his ecowarrior roommate, Arturo; Sarah, a stained-glass artist and uninsured adoptive single mother; Ira, a preschool teacher who lost a previous position when parents objected to his being gay; and Celestino, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant with high ideals and ambitions. Elaborately plotted and luxuriously paced, Glass' inquisitive, compassionate, funny, and suspenseful saga addresses significant and thorny social issues with emotional veracity, artistic nuance, and a profound perception of the grand interconnectivity of life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AMONG the many astute touches in "The Widower's Tale" is the fact that the action takes place within the orbit of two educational institutions looming large in the minds of today's affluent, consumerist parents: an exclusive "progressive" preschool and Harvard. If we can somehow shepherd our children through the first and then into the other, the communal fantasy goes, they'll land safely in some dreamy sphere of the elite, where there's no suffering, no strife, no failure, where the workers are invisible and all the real estate is light-filled. This energized, good-humored novel, Julia Glass's fourth, smashes through that illusion, beginning as satire, becoming stealthily suspenseful and ending up with a satisfyingly cleareyed and compassionate view of American entitlement and its fallout. As the novel opens, Glass's preschool - the drolly named "Elves & Fairies" - has been forced to vacate its longtime home in the picturesque Massachusetts village of Matlock. Its new space, designed by a renowned architect, is under construction in the neglected barn of a cranky widower named Percy Darling, a retired Harvard librarian who rails against his once shaggy town's transformation into a sleek, wealthy "enclave." ("Where did they think they were living, Grosse Point?" he asks in horror about a neighbor's new in-ground sprinkler system.) We're in Glass's version of John Irving country, minus the castration anxiety. The many-roomed old houses are as eccentric as the steely New England citizens, but sped-up, hyper-connected 21st-century life leaves no one and nothing immune to change. Even a seemingly emotionally calcified septuagenarian like Percy will end up surprising everyone. For one thing, while Percy mocks the preschool's "tiny perfect children, along with their preened and privileged parents," he isn't immune to the lure of extravagant parental involvement. He has cut a deal with the director to employ his lovely but aimless 44-year-old daughter, Clover, in exchange for a lease on the barn, which he has kept in its moldering state for years as a kind of shrine to his dead wife, who held dance classes there, back in the looser, more forgiving 1960s. "Family" is the one-word motivation Percy will admit to when he rationalizes his generous and inevitably fateful act. The family is society's most inescapable institution, but in Glass's hands it's also the most shifting and vulnerable. And in "The Widower's Tale" she approaches the ties of kinship with the same joyfully disruptive spirit that animated her previous books. Her families, beginning with the McLeods, who anchored "Three Junes," the novel that won her a National Book Award in 2002, tend to reconstitute themselves into something solid and lasting only after traditional arrangements and expectations have been blown away by bad behavior and bad luck, by tragedies, rivalries and badly kept secrets that reverberate through the generations. In "The Widower's Tale," the death of Percy's wife, Poppy, while her daughters were teenagers, in an accident for which he secretly blames himself, is the past trauma that has bent his family into an awkward shape. Percy has settled into persnickety semi-isolation, still grieving for Poppy, letting the family home crumble around him as Matlock goes upscale. His younger daughter, Trudy, a prominent oncologist in Boston with a trouble-free only child and a staid husband who works as a divorce mediator, has become a model of control and achievement, more available to her patients than to her relatives. Meanwhile, her childlike older sister, Clover, who never settled into a career, simply returned to Matlock, announcing that she needed to "take a 'sabbatical' from marriage and motherhood," and leaving her husband and two children behind in New York. The gig at Elves & Fairies brings her a sense of purpose but also an anguishing lesson in the consequences, legal and emotional, of walking away. 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(That, for all the variety they offer, these four perspectives are male is part of what makes "The Widower's Tale" work so well. Glass is one of those writers who shine especially brightly when they inhabit characters of the opposite sex.) Circling them all is Robert's charismatic roommate, Arturo, who gets him involved with an environmental group whose activism seems to lie somewhere between mischief and criminality. As Glass fleshes out Celestino's and Ira's back stories, she carefully explores the difficulty of living inside the bubble of entitlement without sharing many of its perks and protections. But "The Widower's Tale" hinges on Robert's evolution from high-achieving paragon of a son to something more humanly flawed. Perfectly devoted, enlightened parenting, it turns out, has perils of its own. Unconsciously yearning to differentiate himself from his parents' textbook lives, Robert is naïve as only a young man sheltered from the darker currents of life, even those running through his own family, can be. One might wish that "The Widower's Tale" did more than just edge up to the nexus of serious issues - a blithe American affluence sustained by worldwide poverty, draconian immigration laws, the ever-present specter of environmental disaster - that drives its plot. But Glass's portrait of modern interconnectivity has its own profundity. The more things change, the more they stay the same? Not really. In Julia Glass's fictional universe, embracing life's relentless forward momentum is the paradoxical way of finding a safe place to rest. Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
Another heartwarming winner from the NBA-anointed Massachusetts author.Glass (I See You Everywhere, 2008, etc.) observes and gently mocks her charmingly self-absorbed characters in an unmannered manner reminiscent of her popular contemporary Allegra Goodman and their accomplished forerunner Anne Tyler. This time around, age and youth, urban and small-town life, straight and gay relationships, and aesthetic and political priorities are examined with a beguiling mixture of gusto and delicacy. Focal character Percy Darling is a 70-year-old widower living in retirement (from his longtime employment at Harvard's Widener Library) not far from Boston, where he has donated to a trendy preschool use of the barn on his expansive property. The busy activities at "Elves Fairies" stimulate bittersweet memories of Percy's late wife Poppy, who had housed a dance studio in that very barn, before perishing in a senseless accident 30 years earlier. As the novel ambles deceptively along, gathering momentum and complexity, Percyreally more of a curmudgeon than a "darling"discovers that his life is much more than the shell of its former self he'd been prepared to accept. Glass moves the viewpoint skillfully, showing how Percy's late-life learning curve intersects with those of such variously involved characters as his elder daughter Clover, whose shaky grasp of the responsibilities of adulthood contrasts cruelly with her younger sister's career as a prominent oncologist; her nephew (and Percy's pride and joy) Robert, a Harvard pre-med student who plunges into the darkest waters of environmental activism; gay preschool teacher Ira, an unlikely source of more lessons for Percy; and "illegal" Guatemalan handyman Celestino, an optimist who just may become the man Percy has always believed himself to be. Reversals of fortune and chastening surprises are in store for them all.Glass's perfect plot gives each character his or her due, in an irresistible pastoral tragicomedy that showcases the warmth and wisdom of one of America's finest novelists, approaching if not already arrived at her peak.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
At 70, retired Harvard librarian Percy Darling has turned into a bit of a crank. The gentrification of his quaint New England village and the technological shift in libraries are among his many gripes. The latest assault on Percy's peace and contentment is the presence of a day care he has allowed his daughter to build on his historic property. Multistranded plotlines intersect and connect the others who orbit Percy's world: single mother Sarah, with whom Percy forms an attachment after years of self-imposed monkhood; Percy's daughters Trudy, a renowned breast cancer consultant, and Clover, suffering through a messy custody dispute; his grandson, Robert, whose friends are involved in underground environmental activism; Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener with immigration problems; and Ira, a gay day care worker who had been falsely accused of improper conduct at his previous school. Verdict As she has done so compellingly in earlier novels (e.g., Three Junes), Glass brings together familiar themes, sympathetic characters, and multiple story lines in a harmonious mashup that is sure to enchant her many fans. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/10.]-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 "Why, thank you. I'm getting in shape to die." Those were the first words I spoke aloud on the final Thursday in August of last summer: Thursday, I recall for certain, because it was the day on which I read in our weekly town paper about the first of what I would so blithely come to call the Crusades; the end of the month, I can also say for certain, because Elves & Fairies was scheduled, that very evening, to fling open its brand-new, gloriously purple doors-- formerly the entrance to my beloved barn--and usher in another flight of tiny perfect children, along with their preened and privileged parents. I was on the return stretch of my route du jour, the sun just gaining a vista over the trees, when a youngster who lives half a mile down my street gave me a thumbs-up and drawled, "Use it or lose it, man!" I might have ignored his insolence had he been pruning a hedge or fetching the newspaper, but he appeared merely to be lounging--and smoking a cigarette--on his parents' hyperfastidiously weed-free lawn. He wore tattered trousers a foot too long and the smile of a bartender who wishes to convey that you've had one too many libations. I stopped, jogging in place, and elaborated on my initial remark. "Because you see, lad, " I informed him, huffing rhythmically though still in control, "I have it on commendable authority that dying is hard work, requiring diligence, stamina, and fortitude. Which I intend to maintain in ample supply until the moment of truth arrives." And this was no lie: three months before, at my daughter's Memorial Day cookout, I'd overheard one of her colleagues confide to another, in solemn Hippocratic tones, "Maternity nurses love to talk about how hard it is to be born, how it's anything but passive. They explain to all these New Age moms that babies come out exhausted from the work they do, how they literally muscle their way toward the light. Well, if you ask me, dying's the same. It's hard work, too. The final stretch is a marathon. I've seen patients try to die but fail. Just one more thing they didn't bother to tell us in med school." (Creepy, this talk of muscling one's way toward the dark. Though I did enjoy the concept of all those babies toiling away, lives on the line, like ancient Roman tunnel workers, determined to complete their passage.) As for the youngster with trousers slouched around his bony ankles, my homily had its intended effect. When I finished, he hadn't a syllable at his service; not even the knee-jerk "Whatever" that members of his generation mutter when conversationally cornered. As I went on my way, energized by vindication, I had a dim notion that the youngster's name was Damien. Or Darius. I put him at fifteen, the nadir point of youth. Had he been a boy of his age some twenty years ago, I would have known his name without a second thought, not just because I would have known his parents but because in all likelihood he would have mowed my lawn or painted my barn (gratefully!) for an hourly wage appropriate to a teenage boy's modestly spendthrift habits. Nowadays, teenage boys with wealthy parents do not mow lawns or paint houses. If they stoop to any sort of paid activity, they help seasoned citizens learn to navigate the baffling world of computers and enter tainment modules, charging an hourly wage more appropriate to the appallingly profligate habits of a drug dealer in the Bronx. Damius or Darien might indeed have been the one to coach my own seasoned self through the use of my new laptop computer (a retirement gift that spring from my daughters), and to fleece me accordingly, had I not been the fortunate grandfather of a very intelligent, very kind, adequately well-mannered boy of twenty who was, at the time, an honors student at Harvard. A "good boy," as parents no longer dare to say, cowed by advice from some celebrity pediatrician who's probably fathered two or three litters with a sequence of abandoned wives. But that's what Robert was, to me (and still is, or is again, despite everything that's happened): a Good Boy, on the verge of becoming a solid, productive citizen. "My grandson is a very good boy," I used to say, with pride and confidence, especially within earshot of his mother. Robert had inherited his mother's passion for science, and I had begun to assume, with mixed feelings, that he planned to follow in her professional footsteps. A successful oncologist in Boston, Trudy has become marginally famous as a media source whenever some new Scandinavian study pops up to hint at anything approaching a cure. One day, watching her as she explained a controversial drug to that life-size Ken doll on the six o'clock news, it occurred to me that my younger daughter entered my living room more often as a guest of NBC than as my flesh-and-blood offspring. I saw Robert far more frequently. Robert stayed in close touch with me as contractors, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians jacked up and tore apart my barn so that it could become the new home of Elves & Fairies, Matlock's favorite progressive nursery school. (Simply to look out my back windows that summer felt like spying on the public humiliation of a loyal friend, an ordeal I had engineered.) When these callow strangers--few of whom spoke English by choice--were not perpetrating their mutilations, buttressings, and vigorous eviscerations upon that stately structure, they treated my entire property like an amusement park. During breaks, they would kick a soccer ball back and forth by the pond, and while there were plenty of other shady spots in which to lounge, they ate their lunch on the steps of my back porch, their laughter and indecipherable chitchat echoing throughout my house. I could not even identify the language they shared. It might have been Tagalog or Farsi. Fortuitously, despite my protests, Robert had insisted on setting up an e-mail account when he tutored me on the use of my laptop. After decades at a job where the King Kong shadow of technology loomed ever larger and darker over the simple work I loved, I had fantasies of a quasi-Luddite retirement: I would revel in the pages of one obscurely significant novel after another, abandoning the world of gigabytes and hard drives. Cursed be the cursors; farewell to iEverything and all its pertly nicknamed apps. In a word, ha. That summer, as it turned out, I found my sleek, alarmingly versatile computer a blessing--chiefly because it meant that I heard regularly from Robert, who was working at a coastal conservation outfit up in Maine. He kept me sane by sympathizing with my fury about everything from the cigarette butts and gum wrappers I found in the forsythia bushes to the dozens of alien soda-pop cans I had to haul, along with my own recycling, to the transfer station. Most insulting was the altered view from my desk: my copper beech so rudely upstaged by a large blue closet concealing a toilet. That Thursday, finally, the blue john was carted away. The workmen were gone. My good deed was coming to fruition, and I was determined to put myself in a positive frame of mind. Yes, I was irritated by the youth in the baggy trousers and all that he personified--but he was just one sign among many that the world was changing its colors without my permission. Yes, I was apprehensive about the looming loss, possibly permanent, of certain privileges I had long taken for granted: peace, privacy, and (my daughter Clover had recently informed me) swimming naked in the pond before dark. But I had been led to expect these vexations. And I was excited to learn, from Robert's latest e-mail, that he was now back in Cambridge, preparing to start his junior year. So when I came downstairs after showering, reading two chapters of Eyeless in Gaza, and shooting an e-missive to my grandson inviting him to lunch, I was almost completely happy to find my elder daughter in my kitchen. Almost. There she sat, at the same table where she'd started each day for the first seventeen years of her life, eating a bowl of yogurt sprinkled with what looked like birdseed, drinking tea the color of algae, and paging through my copy of the Grange. For the past year, she'd been renting part of a house across town, yet she continued to make herself at home without announcing her presence. I knew that I ought to feel an instinctual fatherly joy--here she was, safe and hopeful at the very least, possibly even content--yet most of the time I had to suppress a certain resentment that she had made such a wreck of her life and then, on top of that, made me feel responsible for her all over again. Like her younger sister, Clover hadn't lived under my roof since a summer or two during college--unless one were to count the recent period (though one would like to have forgotten it) during which she had languished here after the histrionic collapse of her marriage. For six months, until I helped her move across town and convinced my friend Norval to give her a job at his bookstore, she had gone back and forth between my house and her sister's. "Hey, Daddy." Clover beamed at me. "How was your run?" "Made it to the Old Artillery," I said. (Wisely, she paid me no condescending compliments.) She stood. "Can I make you a sandwich?" "Thank you," I said. "Turkey? Peanut butter? Egg salad?" "Thank you." Clover laughed her deceptively carefree laugh. At an early age, my daughters learned that I do not like unnecessary choices, yet they tease me with them all the same. My favorite restaurants--if any such remain-- are the ones where you're served a meal, no questions asked (except, perhaps, what color wine you'd prefer). You can carry on a civilized conversation without being forced to hear a litany of the twenty dressings you may have on your salad or to pretend you care what distant lake engendered your rainbow trout. As Clover assembled my lunch, she told me in meticulous detail about the last-minute touches she and her new colleagues were putting on the barn to prepare for the open house that night. I sometimes wondered if she could appreciate the depth of the sacrifice I was making--all of it for her. While she twittered on about the final visit from the fire marshal, how she'd held her breath as he peered upward yet again at all those hundred-year-old rafters, my attention wandered to the newspaper, open to the police log. In any given week, the most notable incident in Matlock might be Loud voices reported 2 a.m. on Caspian Way or Pearl earring found under bench at train depot. But then there were such delectably absurd items as Woman apprehended removing lady's slippers from woods off Mallard Lane or Caller on Reed St. complained wild turkeys blocked access to garage. A recent standout was "Bonehead driver" reported at food co-op transfer site. That week, our fearless enforcers had coped valiantly with a Shetland pony wandering free behind the public library, a 911 hang-up, the report of a weird man on a bike riding along a perfectly public road, a complaint about extensive paper detritus blowing across a hayfield, and a car left idling for twenty minutes at Wally's Grocery Stop. But then I came to the listings for the previous Saturday, a day of the week that, in the police log, tends to be dominated by reckless driving at the cocktail hour. This time, however, the first entry for Saturday read, Motor vehicle vandalized and filled with vegetable refuse reported at 24 Quarry Rd. at 6:05 a.m. I burst out laughing. Clover stopped talking and turned from the counter to face me. "You find vaccination records a source of amusement?" I tapped the paper. "This is priceless. Did you read this?" She struggled not to look annoyed. Carrying a plate on which she'd placed a sandwich made with burlap bread, she looked over my shoulder. I read the item aloud. " 'Vegetable refuse'? Now there's something new." "You didn't hear about that?" said Clover. "How would I? I'm no longer on the soirée circuit. I've been branded the town curmudgeon." "You have not. In fact, you are the town savior, in the opinion of seventy-three parents arriving to see their children's fabulous new school this evening." "Until someone's precious little Christopher Robin breaks a toe on the flagstone walk or falls off that fancy jungle gym." Clover uttered a noise of exasperation, but she spared me the usual dose of her newfound philosophy about the magnetic effects of negative thinking. "But this." I pointed to the paper again. "This wins a prize." She sat down across from me and told me that some fellow named Jonathan Newcomb had awakened to find his brand-new Hummer filled with corn husks. "Like, jam-packed with the stuff. And there was this big sign pasted over the entire windshield, and it said, ETHANOL, ANYONE? And they put it on with the kind of glue you can't get off-- in New York, they use it to glue on notices when you don't move your car for the street cleaner." "Who is 'they'?" "The police, Daddy." "No, I mean the 'they' who filled that car with corn." "Just the husks. Nobody knows." I laughed loudly. I might even have clapped my hands. "That's the most creative prank I've heard of in ages." Clover did not partake in my amusement. "Well, Jonathan is on the warpath. He made sure they fingerprinted everything in sight. Like even the hubcaps. He missed a plane, too. His company had an important meeting." "Wait. Quarry Road? Isn't Newcomb the fellow who put down three acres of turf where all that milkweed used to grow like blazes? The field where I used to take you and Trudy to see the butterflies? You know that scoundrel?" "He's a dad, " said Clover. I was baffled by this non sequitur until I realized she was referring to E & F. No doubt Newcomb paid the full, five-figure tuition. Probably times two, for a brace of hey-presto fertility twins. "Can you imagine," she said, sounding deeply concerned, "getting all that corn silk out of the upholstery?" "No. I cannot imagine that." I used my napkin to conceal my smile. Excerpted from The Widower's Tale 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.
