Three Junes (2002)

This novel by Julia Glass, her first, was a National Book Award winner, which is how I came to find out about it. I had a hard time with it—too many characters in general, and specifically they were hard to tell apart as I went along. The title is literal. The novel has three sections, each set in the month of June—of 1989, 1995, and 1999. Within each, the narrator tends to swing between a flashback or flashbacks and an ongoing scene in the present. It's sympathetic to the AIDS epidemic—in many ways that's what it's about. I read it in March 2020 and confess to mixed feelings about epidemics. Suddenly, isolated in my apartment from coronavirus, I felt the epidemic touchpoints keenly, especially as flu symptoms could be such a threat. But it also felt like AIDS was beside the point, with something like a cure for it and better understood now. It's possible I just read this at the wrong time for me. It reminded me of some of my struggles with writers like Flaubert (which might be a compliment), as the writing feels so labored over that it's almost labor to read. It forces one to read slowly, which I'm not against in principle—and I note Flaubert gets a lot better on a second reading. But I was often frustrated with the plodding pace of Three Junes. Some of the issues most important to these characters, such as having children or their fraught relationships with mothers, seemed less important and more the concerns of yuppies, and shallow. The character dying of AIDS seemed more like a caricature of a cultural type, as he is a music critic for the New York Times and has a lot of arrogant opinions about opera and such. There's a dope-smoking chef who's hard to believe and an easygoing macho kind of gay guy I've only read about in books. I also wonder how a straight woman gets a pass to tell this story. She's not insensitive but her stuff about gay men and their mothers hews close to stereotype. It isn't stereotype, it's an issue that is interesting, but I wish I felt she had more insight. I feel like the high praise for Three Junes may have been related to the timing, published when AIDS needed better understanding and more acceptance. I want more than that now.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.