The War for Gloria
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発行者による作品情報
'A legendary writer entirely on his own account' Observer
'Stunningly good' Guardian
Gloria Goltz's intellectual ambitions are derailed when she meets Leonard at college. Self-taught, blue-collar, possessor of an aggressive intelligence, Leonard claims to hold the key to unlocking her potential. After making her pregnant, he disappears. Her son Corey grows up without a father, looking for a male role model - and restless, dreaming of a great adventure.
Instead, when Corey is fifteen, Gloria is diagnosed with motor neuron disease, and his estranged father - this man of domineering charisma and dubious moral character - returns. Determined to be his mother's hero at any cost, Corey begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care, pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease progresses. And as Leonard's influence over son and mother grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father's genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it.
Atticus Lish won a Pen/Faulkner award for his debut Preparation for the Next Life, a novel 'described as the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade' in The New York Times. His second novel confirms Lish as a beguiling storyteller and a prose stylist of extraordinary emotional reach and beauty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PEN/Faulkner Award winner Lish (Preparation for the Next Life) returns with an unflinching and heartbreaking story of a teenage boy taking care of his terminally ill mother while contending with his biological father. Gloria Goltz, an aspiring feminist writer, meets Leonard Agoglia in the mid-1990s while at college in Cambridge. He's a condescending autodidact some two decades older who works security at MIT. She raises Corey by herself in various parts of Boston; sometimes Leonard comes over to play chess. His claim that he witnessed someone murder a woman makes Gloria's lover, Joan, suspect him of foul play. During Corey's sophomore year, Gloria moves them to Quincy, Mass., and is devastated by her diagnosis of ALS. Corey casts around for surrogate father figures with mixed results. There's Tom Hibbard, a "tin knocker" who helps Corey land construction jobs and whose college-bound daughter, Molly, inspires him to give up street fights; Adrian Reinhardt, a physics-obsessed kid from Cambridge who wears a steel cup at all times out of fear of being castrated; and Eddie, an encouraging MMA coach who doesn't have time for Corey's personal problems. With Gloria's condition worsening, Leonard is back in the picture, but he's not much use. The tension slowly burns with Leonard's odious presence on the family futon, and it intensifies as Leonard and Adrian strike up a dangerous friendship during Adrian's first year at MIT. 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. (After a painful fall, she tells Corey, "I tried to jump one last time.") This is a tremendous achievement.
