Books

Julia Glass is a writer firmly in control.

This may occasionally frustrate readers of her new novel, I See You Everywhere, which at times feels like an exercise in author-as-God. Ultimately, it is revealed as something else: genius at work.

The novel dissects the fraught relationship of two sisters, Louisa and Clement, over the course of two decades. Louisa is serious and introspective, baffled by her younger sister's daredevil ways, even as she admires her heedless courage.

Conflict between the dutiful elder sister and the passionate younger sister is hardly a new theme. Indeed, women who enjoy loving, noncompetitive relationships with their sisters are seriously underrepresented in literature. But Ms. Glass finds something new to mine in this oldest of stories.

Chapters alternate between each sister's point of view, often leaving long gaps in the narrative that may exasperate some readers. Interweaving is a device Ms. Glass has used before, to masterful effect, in The Whole World Over and Three Junes, which won a National Book Award. In this novel, it throws into stark relief just how much each character fails to understand the other, despite their closeness.

Ms. Glass' language is lyrical, as always, and never more so than when the sisters speak of each other. Clement believes that Louisa "wears her neuroses and her complaints like colorful floating scarves." Louisa describes their relationship as "a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching."

Fully realized supporting characters have always been another of Ms. Glass' strengths. Here, though, ancillary figures (friends and lovers) routinely disappear from the pages with nary a word of explanation. This can be confounding. What did happen to Clement's long-suffering college boyfriend?

And it's not just characters that leave us with no word. Several crises are resolved off-stage. Or we presume them to be resolved, because Clement and Louisa have moved on when we see them next.

When the novel's tragic twist arrives, it's in the same manner as most Very Bad Things in life. One day it just materializes. Or so it seems. But of course, on further reflection, it was there all along.

Then Ms. Glass' genius becomes apparent. All the abrupt departures, all the unexplained resolutions reinforce the novel's underlying theme: There will always be some things you can never know.

Louisa and Clement, souls coiling around a common axis, remain mysterious to each other, to the very end.

Shawna Seed is a writer in Silver Spring, Md.

Julia Glass

(Pantheon Books, $24)

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