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Jun. 12--If your very first novel won the biggest prize in American publishing, what would you do for an encore?
Write the same book again? Have a nervous breakdown?
Become a hermit, like J.D. Salinger?
"I don't think I could afford to pull a J.D. Salinger," says Julia Glass from her home in Massachusetts, and then she laughs. "In fact, I don't know enough about him to know how could afford to do that!"
Glass' first novel was "Three Junes," and it won the National Book Award in 2002. That's the biggie in American letters, though probably more people have heard of the Pulitzer Prize. Win the National Book Award and you're a made woman.
Other nice things happened for Glass. "Good Morning America" chose the book for its book club. And so on.
A National Book Award for a debut! Unknown writers everywhere gnawed their knuckles in envy.
Never mind that Glass was 44 when it was published, which, yes, is late-blooming in novel writing. Never mind that the impetus to get down to writing it came from a trio of tragedies that befell Glass in her mid-30s: a divorce, a diagnosis of breast cancer, the suicide of her only sibling. Never mind that "Three Junes," an intricate and wise tale of three summers in a family that ranged from Greece to Scotland to the United States, was widely admired.
It's still can inspire panic in the writer who has to follow it up.
But, apparently, not in Glass.
"It took me so long to find something I could do really well, in some ways I feel like I'm making up for lost time," she says. "There's not enough time to do all the writing I'd like to be doing."
A happy protagonist
Her new book is "The Whole World Over," and though it includes one character from "Three Junes" in a minor role, it's an entirely different story. This time, a Manhattan pastry chef, Greenie Duquette, decides to shake her analyst husband out of a long depression by taking a new job -- in New Mexico.
"In this case I wanted to write, for a change, from the point of view of a character who was a naturally happy person," she says. "I wanted to do something consciously different, so I wouldn't write the same book."
Greenie is happy, but she's not perfect. She's impulsive, so her desperate move touches off a cascade of changes in the lives of her family -- not all of them easy or admirable.
Glass sounds like a Greenie on the phone, fast-talking, chatty and easy to laugh. She has lots to say to every question, which might explain why her books are so packed with characters and settings and asides on such topics as pet rescue groups, in which one of the main characters in "The Whole World Over" gets involved.
Glass says she thought at first the novel -- which she began before "Three Junes" was published -- would stay focused on Greenie's marriage.
"But I just couldn't stay in so small a world!" she says. "For me, there's always more and more. If I have a fault, it's that I try to contain too much. It's impossible for me to be a minimalist."
Her natural maximalism extends even to her home, which she shares with her partner, Dennis Cowley, a photographer, and their two sons, ages 10 and 5. Cowley's aesthetic, she says, is captured in his elegant black-and-white photographs.
"But he's constantly losing the battle in our home," Glass says. "It's just filled with color and books and things and photographs and the collections of my life. He once said to me, 'There ought to be a law against people having as much stuff as we have in our house and as much stuff as you have in your books!'
"I mean, in a very affectionate way."
City girl
There are changes in a life after winning the National Book Award, even if the $10,000 prize money doesn't set a writer up for life by itself.
For instance, Glass and her family could move out of their 600-square-foot Manhattan apartment. She wrote the first book mostly at their one table, which served for meals, homework, everything.
Now they live in an 1820 house near the ocean with room for Glass to have an attic office.
"And we have managed to fill it up with stuff so fast I can't believe it!" she says.
Yet, leaving Manhattan was hard for her. The new book revolves around Bank Street, which Glass walked most days while writing it.
In fact, the townhouse pictured on the dust jacket is an actual house on that street.
"That house is probably the most derelict house on a very elegant street," Glass says. The photographer made it mysterious and beautiful, which delights her.
Glass will be far from her new home and from Manhattan for stretches this summer, as she embarks on a tour that takes her to more than 20 cities. She'll be reading and signing books at the downtown Ann Arbor Borders at 7 tonight.
The early reviews for "The Whole World Over" have been good. Glass says many readers tell her they enjoy the new book more than the loss-filled first one.
And yet, some reviewers seem to think that "Three Junes" was a deeper book, because it focused on death and mourning.
"In my experience it's harder to write about the subtleties and pain of love than of loss," she says.
But she's used to the idea that her new book has to be seen through the prism of her first book and its success.
"I find that in some ways one of the hardest obstacles my new book has is my old book."
Contact MARTA SALIJ at 313-223-4530 or salij@freepress.com.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Detroit Free Press
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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