The War for Gloria

Mom, you re always giving me things.

You never ask for anything.

Gloria and Corey cut the biscuits on their brown plastic tray and had them with butter and honey.

Will you mind it when I become a sailor?

Oh no. But I want you to be a smart sailor. I don t want you to be dumb.

But will you mind it when I have to leave home?

I ll have to accept it.

I ll come back and visit. Voyages usually take about three years. Whaling voyages can take seven.

There was a pattern between them of her getting blue and of him helping her. She got blue because of herself. She had not fulfilled the ambition she d had at seventeen, smoking a cigarette in front of her concrete dorm building at Lesley College in the shadow of Harvard in the literal shadow of its tombstone-shaped ivy-covered law library to think and write and shock the world, to condemn it, to synthesize all the available evidence art, history, movies, negative images and messages in the media, her upbringing, her body in the mirror, her own thoughts, even the smallest things down to the cigarette in her mouth into a single scream of rage against the patriarchy. Instead she d been a waitress, a barmaid taking bottles off a counter after the bar was closed and the band was unplugging its amps and it was too late to do anything but sleep the next day away. And this had gone on for years years of telling herself that she was finding her voice, that she was getting ready years of reading not writing, of groggy afternoons, a feminist book in her hands on the T, Sex and Destiny, Doc Martens on her feet, reading at the Au Bon Pain, jumping up from her wire chair and standing on the red leather toes of her boots to hug the

Andre Dubus III, The New York Times Book Review

The poise of Mr. Lish s writing makes this bleak story so dangerously absorbing. Gloria s inexorable degeneration from ALS is charted with devastating care and observational nesse . . . The powerfully ambiguous ending brings to a tting close a remarkable portrait of a sensitive boy forced into a life of hardness and violence . . . [Lish is] a superbly original talent. Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
 
Solemn, punishing, kinetic, in easy contact with dark areas of the psyche, and yet heartbreaking in its portrait of a mother and son facing her mortal illness . . . Lish s novel is powerful, intelligent, brooding and most of all convincing; it earns its emotions . . . It more than pays off on the promise of his first novel, Preparation for the Next Life, which won the 2015 PEN/Faulkner award . . . You never sense [Lish] is merely writing quality fiction ; he seems to draw instead from a deep well of experience, especially when it comes to the tastes and textures of life on the economic margins . . . The War for Gloria works because the details are so casually drilled home . . . Gloria is this novel s great, glowing presence. Lish is exacting in his portraiture. Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Set on the fringes of greater Boston, a grim and nihilistic world of construction sites, strip clubs, and cage fights, this assured novel revolves around the conflict between a teen-ager, Corey, and his neglectful, manipulative father. The novel offers a complex exploration of masculinity, veering from the fierce, destructive aggression of Corey s encounters with his father to the tender, attentive dedication he displays toward his mother. Lish writes with unhurried precision, avoiding sentimentality yet generating enormous emotional resonance. The New Yorker

Fascinating . . . Lish has a great lyrical talent, one on display in restrained flashes throughout . . . what a strange genius, this author, of a novel full of such tenderness and violence, such oedipal love and oedipal rage . . . Lish not only invokes, engages with, and subverts the modes of the Hollywood Boston Gothic he dives headlong into them . . . I ve never seen [Boston] evoked in such brilliant detail and with such total control on the page . . . The portrait is heartbreaking.
Christian Lorentzen, Harper s Magazine

A deeply moving and harrowing story of a teenage boy who takes care of his ALS-stricken mother and tries to distinguish himself from his toxic biological father. Confident and humble, this is a once-in-a-decade triumph. Publishers Weekly [Top 10 Books of the Year]

Brutally devastating . . . The War for Gloria is an unrepentantly American novel a big, unwieldy beast about the white working class, the travails of masculinity, Boston, and the ever-present ghosts of the past . . . Lish [is] the kind of writer who doesn t just put his characters through the wringer but slowly and methodically destroys them, makes clear that this is a novel not of quiet epiphany and triumph but of American devastation. Alex Perez, Washington Examiner

"A painfully yet beautifully detailed history of Corey and Gloria and their journey through her illness you have to admire Lish for pushing his vision to the limit, and some of his sentences are so powerful they seem to have been forged in some kind of roaring foundry. Marion Winik, WYPR

Unflinching and heartbreaking . . . Lish imbues the male characters varied pitches of toxic masculinity with great sadness, smoothing the edges off their macho posturing, and he writes with devastating empathy of Gloria s highs and lows. This is a tremendous achievement.
Publishers Weekly [starred review]

With staccato prose and razor-sharp descriptions of working-class Boston, PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Lish excels at storytelling. The descriptions of Gloria s struggle with ALS and Corey s role as caregiver are nothing short of brilliant . . . [The War for Gloria] is powered by remarkable empathy and humanity."
Booklist [starred review]