Glass
A Novel
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
“Typically, memoir gives us the emotional high points, but Savage’s Edna inverts that: She writes loneliness and tedium, the bits and pieces that are hard to look at, or that typically wind up on the cutting room floor.” —The Los Angeles Times
“A dazzling, graceful novel. . . . Glass gives us both a life story told well and tantalizingly in unspooled snippets, and a thoughtful rumination on the nature of late-life reflection itself.” —The Star Tribune
“Glass is a fantastic experiment in perspective and an oddly memorable book.” —January Magazine
“Sam Savage creates some of the most original, unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction.” —Poets & Writers
“Introspection is at the heart of this new novel from Savage, which effectively defines that jewel of a word, velleity (the lowest level of compulsion to act, a slight impulse to do something).” —Library Journal, starred review
“Savage’s decision to use the point of view of an unreliable narrator will capture the attention of readers of literary fiction. The wry, bizarre humor will keep it.” —Booklist
“Evocative, poetic, and compelling.” —New York Journal of Books
“Glass transforms through Edna’s pathology (and Savage’s relentless vision) into a deeply felt exploration of memory, of what it means to outlive the sources of one’s suffering.” —BookPage
“[Glass is] Sam Savage’s examination of the truth of memory, the effects of self-imposed solitude, and the churning verbal mechanics of writer’s mind.” —Shelf Awareness
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like a milder Good Morning, Midnight, Savage's new novel (after The Cry of the Sloth) is driven by the dithering narration of a woman adrift in the world. In this case, however, the compulsive recollections and endless qualifications of Edna, a failed writer and the elderly widow of a marginal writer, amount to little of interest. Prompted by a reissue of her husband's one successful work, but writing with no clear purpose, Edna drifts between minute explanations of her current circumstances the position of her furniture; the state of her grapes to often vibrant, outsized memories of her privileged but troubled childhood and her bohemian life with her late husband. Her repeated scorn for him and his forgettable Hemingwayesque "outdoor stories," reveals her most notable trait: snobbishness. (On the other hand, he referred to her efforts as "Edna's remembrance of everything past.") There is little to hold on to but a general sense of solitude and depression. It's only toward the end, as Edna unravels, that any sense of real psychology develops. Early promise of mysterious affairs or incarcerations amounts to nothing, and the lack of structure on several levels (no chapters, for one), though true to character, contributes to the enervating effect.
