September mourn

BEFORE the plot of Julia Glass’ “The Whole World Over” veered into the twin towers at the base of Manhattan, it had been flying pretty high.

In the preceding 435 pages, Glass was commandeering a more-than-respectable novel in which couplings and decouplings, parenthoods and childhoods, fidelities and infidelities were movingly drawn from the grist of everyday life and the human heart’s tendency to wander so fitfully.

Yet when her characters are sped through the public trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, a day whose gravity is akin to a black hole, the book’s grounding is altered. The aftereffect is that of a picture printed slightly out of register, one imagistic and emotional totality overstruck by another, blurring both contexts.

“The Whole World Over” is not a Sept. 11 novel, at least not in the way that Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” attempt to be, but the risk is that it will be treated as one. Rather amazingly, Glass manages to avoid the maudlin in her book’s last 70 pages and generally be true to that fateful Tuesday in an atmospheric sense -- downtown, at least.

Instead, “The Whole World Over” is a far broader New York novel, its characters triangulating geographically to or from New Mexico, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, California and elsewhere. Readers of Glass’ first novel, the National Book Award-winning “Three Junes,” will be familiar with the author’s penchant for such cartographic flux and recognize as well her continued fondness for food, romantic angst, intergenerational pain and habitual shuffling of time frames. Glass’ writing consistently sluices toward back story, which induces in readers a forgetfulness, or nonchalance, about where the winds of time have landed us.

In fact, the knowledge that we are in 2001 dawns late in “The Whole World Over,” due to an intentional lack of specificity -- only when a restaurant reservation is made at Windows on the World (atop the north tower) and George W. Bush is referred to as the court-appointed president does the reader intuit that the twin towers still exist, but it is very late in their day.

This coyness is the most prominent, and nearly the only, aspect of the novel that introduces a sense of disingenuousness or artificiality. Elsewhere, when the intentions of Glass’ main characters are ambiguous or wavering, or when seemingly simple questions remain unresolved (a paternity issue, for example), the indeterminacy reinforces the novel’s true-to-life feel.

“The Whole World Over” is a generous, tentacled, ensemble novel -- Glass prefers a wide lens when she works, deploying many characters, and she sacrifices some depth for range (out of necessity). She is deft at the quick portraiture and character shorthand, however, that this novelistic approach requires, and the mix-and-match love lives of her characters share common elements that help bind them together thematically.

Loosely, the choice between taking to one’s heels or effecting a stiff-upper-lippism underlies much of the action in the book. Freedom is counterpoised to home life in one way or another, especially when the latter represents an unhappy stasis. A neurologically damaged character nicknamed Saga even casts it as a kind of metaphysical paradox when she wonders, viewing a map of bird migration routes, “Could you be a roving homebody?”

As in “Three Junes,” Glass opens her novel with a chapter that contains traces of the primordial matter from which the rest of the story will arise. We find a disaffected wife on Bank Street in Manhattan (a vintage Glass setting) as “The Whole World Over” begins. A dessert specialist, founder and owner of the hit bakery Pastries by Miss Duquette, she is divulging her marital problems to a client-slash-friend named Walter.

Charlotte Greenaway Duquette, a.k.a. “Greenie,” who is so busy that she turns away clients, is married to a therapist who is slowly losing them, in New York City, no less. “Playground of the rich and narcissistically needy, of the overly pampered whining id,” Walter muses to himself, adding, “Who could want for psychic fodder in a place like this?”

The same rhetorical question might strike many as “The Whole World Over” proceeds, for Glass’ pages are flush with psychic fodder: the guilt of abandonment, the guilt of adultery, survivor guilt (both Greenie’s and Walter’s parents died tragically in car accidents), parental guilt, regrets over one’s own shortcomings and, driving a few characters as dramatically as anything else: baby lust.

Not to worry, it’s not all Sturm und Drang -- some of Glass’ creations are bons vivants, and there is also the sturdy, enduring Fenno McLeod, who narrated the central portion of “Three Junes,” his Bank Street bookshop an integral part of the new novel and a point of intersection for several characters.

Greenie relates to Walter that she has just received a call to audition for a job as chef for the governor of New Mexico, a retro-male named Ray McCrae who is unreconstructed by any ideals of feminism or environmentalism but reputed to possess animal magnetism and great personal energy that is, well, winning. Walter, who has an anodyne effect on Greenie, had been the one to give McCrae her name. He is the proprietor of Walter’s Place, a restaurant that “felt like a living room turned pub” and serves “Eisenhower-era food,” and the governor had recently dined there and sampled Greenie’s dessert wares.

The potential unraveling of the marriage between Greenie and Alan, a somewhat uptight therapist curiously befuddled by his own innards, is the main focal point of the novel, but Glass has multiple interwoven story lines. Walter is emotionally close to her but gay, and so a romantic threat to Alan only in that he encourages Greenie to move on. He’s a foil to Alan, though, in his buoyancy and passion -- and ends up having an affair with Gordie, one half of a gay couple who happen to be in counseling with Alan. Whole world, small world.

Greenie and Alan have a 4-year-old son named George, and when Greenie examines his wooden jigsaw puzzle of the U.S. and picks up New Mexico, “a luscious maraschino red,” then snaps it back into place with “a small, solid click,” it doesn’t take Freud to guess where she’ll head. She takes George with her when she goes west, leaving an angry Alan behind to choose whether or not to follow. That’s the setup, and their respective perambulations, romantic and otherwise, follow.

A parallel story involves Saga, who was hit on the head by a falling tree limb and spends the book trying to recover her own sense of normalcy, much as the rest of Glass’ characters do. Saga does animal rescue work for a makeshift group called True Protectors, and it is the sort of rescue the people of “The Whole World Over” seek and attempt to perform: Greenie with her move, Alan with his counseling, Alan’s sister and one of his clients in their struggle to adopt children. The desire for gain in the face of life’s calculus of loss -- hardly a fair matchup.

Saga has trouble with words. “Entropy, atrophy, fecundity,” she gropes at one point, words that pretty well cover the ground of “The Whole World Over.” We learn that Walter’s wish -- so common, so communal -- is “to be genuinely, uniquely needed,” but the real prize is held by young George, as Alan sees it, “for whom the world was still mostly aglow, so eminently knowable, even waiting and eager to be known.”