From the author of the best-selling Three Junes comes anintimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together andapart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years.
LouisaJardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise andcareful: the one who years for a good marriage, an artistic career, afamily. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable,iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for herdaring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always beenthe favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of thefence–mine–every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closerto that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world–orplummet in very grand style.”
In this vivid, heartrendingstory of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters growcloser as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York whileClem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands inthe Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like adouble helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet nevertouching.”
Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work, I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.
The fictional palate of Julia Glass, bestselling author of 2002's Three Junes,is one of dog-breeding women and foxhunts, tony Manhattan galleries andboutiques, European travel and haute-cuisine chefs. In common withRebecca Wells's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood franchise, Glass's third novel, I See You Everywhere,has female bonding among the landed gentry, a focus on relationships,and devil-may-care, enigmatically charming women of great romanticallure.
Like Three Junes, the novel is a series ofvignettes across the years, in this instance from the points of view oftwo sisters with different personalities. Louisa, the elder, is thesteady sister on the lookout for love, while Clem is the youngersister, an adventuring, restless spirit with an unfortunate habit ofchewing men up and spitting them out. Their parents, too, resemblethose in Three Junes: the mother is obsessed with raising andtraining expensive dogs on a country estate (this time in Rhode Islandinstead of Scotland); their father is a good-natured, kindly soul whoplays second fiddle to a powerful wife. Louisa, not unlike Glassherself, is an urban woman who inhabits the New York art world andmoves from making art (pottery) to writing; Clem, being a wilder sort,has a passion for wild animals and moves around the remoter reaches ofthe continent as an itinerant biologist to do contract work withcharismatic fauna ranging from seals to grizzly bears. It's notentirely clear how the sisters relate to each other's livelihoods; Clemseems largely uninterested in art, whereas Louisaalternates betweenlavishly praising her sister's work to save animals as heroic andreferring to polar bears, in 2005, as "like Al Gore... suddenly all thealarmist rage."
City and country mouse have a wary,competitive, sometimes antagonistic relationship grounded in affection;they occasionally steal each other's boyfriends, but are usually therefor each other in times of need, up to and including possible drowning,maiming and cancer. Both cook well, though Louisa is the true gourmet.Clem is better in the sack, at least if we take her word for it: as shesays in a letter-reminding us, perhaps inadvertently, of the piñacolada song-what she likes most in life are laughter, sex, champagneand sunsets. The sisters do have music in common: though both white,they listen almost exclusively to music by black performers, fromBillie Holiday to Bob Marley.
