Atticus Lish appeared out of nowhere, an unknown who, without a literary agent, published his debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, with indie darling New York Tyrant in 2014 and proceeded to win the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2016 Grand Prix de Litterature Americaine. An “important new voice,” as the critics say, had arrived. This Lish was a throwback, an author who’d written a big, heady novel about America and masculinity and the psychological wounds that will not, and cannot, heal. At a time when the playful, bloodless affectation of the Ben Lerner variety dominated the literary culture, here was a writer with a hardness and an eye for squalor that bordered on the repellent.
Preparation for the Next Life was a “New York novel” insofar that it took place in the city, but unlike the twee professional-class entertainments that make up the modern New York canon, it was populated by blue-collar down-and-outers from the fringes of Queens and featured a romance between a traumatized Iraq War veteran and a near-illiterate Chinese immigrant. Reading it for the first time, I thought, this is an important new voice — who is this dude?
Lish, as I suspected, turned out to be the son of the infamous literary editor Gordon Lish, a cranky eccentric who nurtured writers such as Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah. The elder Lish, one of the last of the power-broker editors who could take a talented unknown and make him a household name, had not, it seemed, done the same for his son, a middle-aged man with no literary credits who’d published his debut with an independent press. Atticus Lish is literary royalty, yes, but as was made clear in the press following Preparation for the Next Life’s success, his estranged father played no part in the novel’s publication. The two have since reconciled, but the tension between them, and the younger Lish’s rejection of the posh literary life he was born into, are throughlines that animate not only Preparation for the Next Life but also his follow-up, the brutally devastating new bildungsroman The War for Gloria.
In The War for Gloria, Lish has left behind seedy New York and situated his characters in the white, working-class neighborhoods of greater Boston, where Gloria, a failed feminist writer, and her son, Corey, the novel’s linchpin and your classic angry white male, try their best to navigate the constant barrage of indignities life is throwing their way. The single mother and son spend time living out of a car and move from one dilapidated apartment to another while Gloria shuffles between dead-end jobs, but it isn’t until she is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease that Lish, 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.
As Gloria degenerates, Leonard, her on-and-off-again lover and Corey’s father, reenters in their lives and the novel’s themes begin to take shape: “Nature could not be understood, not ever. To experience chaos, she saw that you didn’t need a storm. All you needed was the right man. Leonard always left her. He was like her inspirations. She never knew when he would call again. She recognized the faucet turned off, but not quite all the way, inside his head. And hers as well. If you plotted his visits on a graph, the self-similar beauty would emerge. The minutes with him would look like the weeks, and the weeks would look like the years. All the essays she’d never written and never would. It would make a fractal, Gloria was certain. It would bloom like clouds or a starfish or a tree.”
Leonard, a sociopathic autodidact who works as a security guard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, functions as a spectral presence, sometimes there, sometimes not. But his malevolence infects everyone he comes into contact with. Leonard is a damaged man obsessed with a decades-old unsolved murder who suffers from delusions of grandeur, his insecurity fueling a rage that he directs at Gloria and Corey. The feud between father and son grows increasingly sinister and violent as Gloria’s condition worsens, the two men losing sight of the woman who bound them in battle.
The War for Gloria is a novel about toxic men and the boys who grow up to become them, but it is not, as it will surely be framed, a book about “toxic masculinity.” These men are not manipulated by populist politics or radicalizing memes but disfigured by family breakdown, brought about by absent and failed fathers and by the mothers who choose them. The lone moment in the novel in which the monstrous Leonard, a man who beats and berates a terminally ill woman, shows any humanity is when he looks at a picture of “a woman seemingly dressed in the white robes of old Palestine, hawk-nosed, beautifully bird-of-prey like.” The scene ends with Leonard’s origin story: “It was a portrait of his mother, which she had posed for and taken in 1971, the year his natural father died — of malnutrition and exposure somewhere out on the street in Eastie after two decades of using heroin. Leonard had been born in 1958, the year before birth control had been invented and the intrauterine device.”
With Gloria’s death a foregone conclusion, the question at the center of the novel is a simple one: Will the teenage Corey overcome his past, or will his father succeed in transforming him into yet another drugged-out and unfeeling man whose sole purpose is the continuation of a lineage of degradation and debasement? Corey takes up MMA fighting in the hope of finding annihilation and rebirth through physical exertion: “When he peeled off his kneepads, his knees were skinned and macerated. He stank like kerosene, ammonia, aldehyde, sweat. His waterlogged clothes looked like he’d been dunked in the ocean. Foreign hairs from the mat were sticking to his skin. His arm was hyperextended. His toes were jammed. There was a pull in his back. His head ached. Water nauseated him, yet there wasn’t enough water in the world that he could drink to satisfy his thirst. His brain had shrunk inside his head. He could hardly think or talk.”
Physically beaten to a pulp, Corey searches for male kinship in the construction jobs he works once he’s forced to quit school and provide for Gloria. He meets solid but broken men, including Tom, a construction worker and the father of his crush. But Tom, as with everyone else in The War for Gloria, is haunted by his own ghosts and has no time or energy for a boy on the brink. And then there’s Adrian, a rich kid from Cambridge heading to MIT whom Corey idolizes for his scientific prowess — until he realizes that the self-proclaimed genius is perhaps as dysfunctional and dangerous as Leonard. Adrian, who wears an athletic cup at all times because his mother, post-divorce, snuck into his room wearing a Halloween mask and wielding scissors, fears castration. He is repulsed by and attracted to women. He works out like a fiend, takes pride in his “rationality,” and doesn’t shower in order to cultivate a pungent body odor. Adrian comes from a privileged background, but in Lish’s universe, the only privilege that matters is the ability to rise above one’s origins.
The final third of the novel devolves into a Boston crime thriller involving Corey, Andrew, and Leonard, a plot move that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t quite work, but it doesn’t devalue what came before or the novel as a whole. Lish was obviously going for broke here, and one can’t help but respect a writer who takes risks, not only thematically but also stylistically. 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.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
