A highly honored and beloved children’s author dies just before the outset of Julia Glass’s wonderful A House Among the Trees, and plunges his associates into a temporary chaos. This book features intimate views on acting, museum curation, the pressures of celebrity, loneliness, art, literature, and grief. It’s packaged up in typical Julia Glass fashion: characters with gratifying depth, lots of humor, and lots of striving for the best outcome.
Tomasina (Tommy) Daulair, for three decades the indispensable assistant to world-famous children’s author and illustrator Morty Lear, inherits a whirlwind at the time of his sudden death. Not only does Morty leave her the stately Connecticut house, property, furnishings - the whole physical kit and caboodle - he also makes her the executor of his will. And it’s a will with some very unpleasant surprises for a children’s museum curator in New York. Tommy is nowhere near ready for the responsibilities.
Into this fraught moment steps a young British actor, fresh off an Oscar win for a film from the prior year, and a truly fetching young man he is, with a posh accent to match. He’s visiting because he’s going to portray the author in a film. There’s Meredith (Merry), the spurned museum director and Dani, Tommy’s put-upon younger brother. As Tommy struggles to cope with her postmortem duties, all descend unexpectedly on Tommy, and the house, at a kind of impromptu summit meeting.
The author meticulously prepares the reader for this gathering, so that the way it plays out and its effect on the participants ring perfectly true. All the novel’s notes of selfishness, betrayal, of love, professionalism, and devotion come together to sound a lovely carillon arpeggio. The reader comes away with further devotion to Ms. Glass.
This novel mixes its lighter threads (the actor’s apprenticeship to a brilliant older actress in his Oscar performance, and his later relationship with Tommy, and the dead author’s oeuvre and his creative process, described sumptuously with depth and color) with its more discouraging story lines (Merry devastated by the snub in the author’s will, and Dani’s imagined slights, nurtured over the decades). Like the other Julia Glass pieces I’ve read, this one shows a deep love for New York. I recommend this book - it’s vivid, gratifying, paced beautifully, and has Ms. Glass’s signature big heart.
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