A Sweeping Family Saga of Breaking and Mending

GLASSWORKS, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

I smashed a bottle while reading Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel, “Glassworks.” I had the book in one hand and a container of hair oil in the other, and the bottle slipped, ricocheted off the sink and shattered. Once I’d processed my untimely jolt away from the novel, I smiled at the irony. In “Glassworks,” everything breaks. Conversations are interrupted by wrecked plates, bodies harmed and psyches laid bare. In this story, you have to learn to navigate destruction.

“Glassworks” is a panoramic family saga told in four novellas, each peering over the shoulder of the preceding generation. We follow Agnes in 1910; her son, Edward, in 1938; his daughter, Novak, in 1986; and Flip, the daughter of a woman Novak loves, in 2015. Their tale is one of fracturing and reforming — much like the glass each character somehow works with. They all wrestle with similar questions: How do you develop a self, what defines a legacy, and what do you need to destroy to create it?

The book opens with Agnes Carter, a wealthy donor to a Boston university, who hires Ignace Novak, a naturalist and glassblower, to create scientific models. Privately, Agnes is tormented by a violent, money-squandering husband. Her story introduces a motif that runs throughout “Glassworks” — the split self. Agnes is a woman divided between happiness and obligation. She quietly falls in love with Ignace, who rocks from moments of brilliance to deep mental illness. Their relationship is defined by their proximity to both beauty and brutality, building and breaking. Wolfgang-Smith’s writing sings within this tension.

When Ignace is stung by a honeybee, the pair retrieve its squashed carcass and Agnes starts to draw it. The bee sketch inspires a tiny glass model, which is then passed down the generations. It becomes a powerful metaphor. “The honeybee: dangerous with a power far beyond its size, but only at the price of self-annihilation.”