KEY POINTS:
I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE
By Julia Glass
Random House, $34.99
Reading I See You Everywhere is a bit like dipping in and out of someone else's life. It can be confusing at times as you try to catch up with where they're at and what you've missed in the intervening years. Minor characters come and go, just as people do in the course of any real life. Relationships that are important at one stage hardly seem to figure the next. Award-winning US author Julia Glass has constructed her story quite cleverly. There are moments where the reader may struggle to get a grip on things but I can't help feeling she planned it that way.
The novel is about two very different sisters: wild, outdoorsy Clem and intense, arty Louisa and is told, in alternating chapters, from each woman's perspective. (Glass doesn't tell us which sister is speaking, again forcing the reader to work that bit harder). It opens in 1980 as Louisa hurries across the country to lay claim to some of her late great-aunt's jewellery before Clem can get her hands on it. The story continues to follow their lives in irregular instalments right up to 2005.
From the get-go it is clear the sisters have a complicated, often uncomfortable relationship. Louisa, the responsible older sister, is jealous of Clem who is her mother's favourite, more popular with men and has the more heroic career.
The balance between sibling love and rivalry is at the heart of this wandering storyline. Glass shows us all the trickiness of sisterly love - the bonds, the affection, the spikiness and misunderstandings. Neither character is wholly likeable. And readers might find themselves irritated and disappointed by them at times, just as the sisters so often are in each other.
Perhaps the reason this story is so utterly true to life is that the author has taken much of it from elements of her own past. Many of the big life events Louisa goes through in the course of the book's 25-year scope also happened to Glass and apparently she had a sister who shares much with Clem. But this is also an author with a natural knack for filling in the lights and darks of human relationships and one who knows how to write a spirited story.
I See You Everywhere won't appeal to readers who want every last detail of a story served up to them on a plate but it's an engaging read with plenty to relate to - particularly if you happen to have sisters.
- Detours, HoS
