A House Among The Trees

The Writer’s Life

A House Among The Trees is the sixth book by award-winning writer Julia Glass, at the centre of which is Mort Lear, a bestselling and beloved writer-illustrator of children’s books, and the actor, Nicholas “Nick” Greene who is to play him in a Hollywood biopic. The link between the two, is Tomasina Daulair, aka Tommy, Lear’s longtime assistant, who was everything ("daughter, mother, gatekeeper, amanuensis”), but a lover to the gay author. When Mort dies suddenly after a fall, Tommy finds that he has left her his fortune (including the house in the picturesque village of Orne), but also put on her the responsibility of setting up a half-way house for runaway boys.

Mort dies just before Nick is to visit him, so Tommy is left to deal with the actor and all the problems that crop up when she is faced with the difficult task of settling all the demands made on her.  The book is entirely character-driven and quite unpredictable.  If the reader expects a romance between the reclusive Tommy and the glamorous Nick, that is nipped by her being old enough to be his mother; if a satire on Hollywood’s tendency to appropriate and twist anybody’s life to make “the kind of movie you watch in order to be swept away by crisis or intrigue or menace or laughter or the conquering power of love,"  is expected, there is very little of behind-the-scenes revelation.

The book is reportedly loosely based on life of gay author-illustrator Maurice Sendak, but Glass is equally invested in the stories of Tommy, her brother Dani who was the model for Mort’s iconic character Ivo, Mort’s self-centered lover, Soren Kelly (who dies of AIDs) as, well as the Oscar-winning, newly-minted celebrity Nick and a museum curator, Meredith, who loved Mort and wants to set up a section on his work in a new museum devoted to children’s literature. Mort had a dark secret, which when hinted at in a magazine interview, takes on a different direction altogether and neither Nick not Tommy can set it right.

The tone is gentle, humorous and sensitive, and though nothing too dramatic takes place, the reader gets fascinated by, and invested in, what happens to the characters—particularly Tommy, who is never able to emerge from Mort’s prison of dependence and is even sidelined completely in the film, in which the spotlight shifts to Soren, and an animated Ivo.  One would like to know how she copes with life away from that house among the trees—Tommy may not be heroine material, but then everyone deserves a story; Tommy’s started when, at age 12, she met Mort in a park.

A House Among The Trees

By Julia Glass

Publisher: Pantheon

Pages: 368