The War for Gloria
A novel
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4.2 • 13 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • This “deeply immersive novel” (The Washington Post) from the author of the award–winning Preparation for the Next Life is an “epic coming-of-age tale filled with pain, heartache, fear, and undying love” (The Associated Press), as a young man’s yearning to protect his dying mother requires him to risk destroying his estranged, enigmatic, powerful father.
“From its hypnotic opening pages, we find ourselves in the sure hands of a roaming omniscient narrator, one who knows intimately the beating hearts of its two central characters” —Andre Dubus III, The New York Times Book Review
Corey Goltz grows up in the working-class outskirts of Boston as the only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of leaving home for a great adventure.
Instead, when he is fifteen, the world comes crashing down upon him, when Gloria is diagnosed with ALS and, too late, his estranged father, Leonard—a man of great charisma but dubious moral character—reenters the picture. 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 cruelly progresses. And as Leonard’s influence over Corey grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father’s genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it.
Gritty, visceral, and profoundly stirring, The War for Gloria tells the story of a young man, straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to risk destroying his father. An indelible work from a strikingly original voice in American fiction.
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.
