Atticus Lish’s second novel, The War for Gloria, is, by and large, a monster—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. 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 details are intimate and harrowing and, to some degree, drive the core of the narrative ... Lish’s novel is powerful, intelligent, brooding and most of all convincing; it earns its emotions. Two things in it don’t convince ... No matter. The War for Gloria works because the details are so casually drilled home.
... profoundly affecting ... Lish’s substantial gifts are in abundant display here and throughout this gorgeously written book—his ability to render urban landscapes, the weather and its subtle effects on the emotions of his characters, the textural experience of poverty and class stratification in our early-21st-century America, physical labor, as well as physical and psychic violence. All of this is captured by a passionate narrative voice that has clearly been around, one that intimately knows not only the rigors of confined combat in a cage fight but also the bruised and hungry heart of a woman yearning to fulfill her potential before she dies. But at the core of The War for Gloria is the unforgettable character of Corey, a young man who is left to care for his dying mother alone, a boy who is hurled into the hard streets to find his solitary way ... With this, only his second novel, Lish has not only created a work of enduring art, he has distinguished himself as one of our finest writers.
Gloria and Corey live in Quincy, a Boston suburb ... Lish excels at its physical and social geography ... Lish can produce a sketch of a neighbourhood that is suffused with a character’s point of view ... How to do justice to this relentless progression [of ALS] without capitulating to it and thereby emptying the novel of every hopeful possibility? The War for Gloria is a strong title, but for much of the book it’s hard for the reader to work out who is fighting it ... It sometimes seems as if the novel itself is...trying to move away from helplessness and its burdens, despite their being its subject ... Sometimes Lish renounces any access to what either party is thinking or feeling ... Elsewhere there’s a descriptive ecstasy in Lish’s writing that sometimes leads him to pack in more epithets than the grammar can comfortably hold ... the umbilical cord between writer and character is sometimes stretched too far ... It’s the predetermined ending of ALS above all that must somehow be both accommodated and resisted, if death is not to have the last word ... A theme of self-sacrificial patriotism arrives very suddenly and makes the last pages queasy with unearned uplift. Strangest of all is an extreme genre shift, strongly propelled before being allowed to fizzle, into something like thriller territory, complete with outbursts of coldly described violence ... For the duration there’s an amnesty on empathy and a release of something like glee when bodies are subjected to a single pulse of annihilating energy, rather than slow-motion disassembly, though the effect is not of development but dislocation.
This is coming-of-age fiction in extremis...and the reader is dragged well beyond safe emotional boundaries as well. 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 finesse ... This is a far fuller novel than I can indicate here ... A brutal murder late in the proceedings carries it toward the formulas of Boston crime noir, somewhat weakening Mr. Lish’s spell. But the powerfully ambiguous ending brings to a fitting close a remarkable portrait of a sensitive boy forced into a life of hardness and violence.
... formidable ... draws power from plunging into lives most writers ignore ... Their plight spares him none of the regular coming-of-age yearnings and the gut-level dread that hangs over the book lies not only in the steady creep of Gloria’s symptoms, but in our dawning sense that Corey is looking in all the worst possible places for help figuring himself out ... We know right from the start where this gruelling story must go, yet in Lish’s universe even death brings no respite: any glimmer of release only ever heralds just another tightening of the screw. You can’t look away: what begins as a pulverising portrait of the financial and emotional jeopardy of terminal illness morphs, by the end, into a gothically horrific tale of predatory manipulation. That Lish keeps you nothing but rapt by his last-gasp gear change (nigh on unbearably grim, be warned), is, I suspect, just one of many signs that in years to come he’ll be spoken of as a legendary writer entirely on his own account.
... heavy and ingenious ... Lish writes in a brawny, rhythmic style with lots of edge ... Long stretches of his prose are magnificent. The portrayal of caregiving, and the toll it takes, is brutal and understanding ... This being the war for Gloria, I would have liked more of her. We see her deterioration mainly through Corey; sometimes Lish ellipts his experience of milestones in Gloria’s decline for the sake of cadence. The narrative minimises her presence as an individual as the disease does, when it might have been more in keeping with the project to amplify it. (Since Corey’s day-to-day physical labour and combat are afforded granular realisation, Gloria’s qualifies for the same.) Instead the space is filled by Adrian and Leonard, who develop the story in a terrible, lurid direction ... My capacity for gloom was given a thorough test; some of the hardship and malevolence came to feel unconvincing, due to their sheer volume ... as impressive as it is repulsive. What with his protagonist’s obsession with overcoming physical limits and his own pursuit of mixed martial arts, I couldn’t work out if Lish intended to push readers beyond their pain thresholds, to see how long it might take them to tap out under the choke.
... stunningly good ... Lish writes with strong, relentless economy, like a boxer punching a bag. Hemingway comes to mind ... The often laser-like focus of Lish’s prose invests everything he pays attention to with importance, whether it’s the moment Gloria’s fingers can no longer grasp a fork, preparing a boat for winter, or skating home from a thrash concert. Extraordinarily, he has written a 440-page book with no flab ... frequently surprising, which is one of its strengths, but Lish also makes some odd decisions ... Personally, I find Lish’s writing so involving that if the price is an occasional dollop of undigested research, or a miscalculated point of view, I’ll pay it. I also willingly followed the turn the novel takes in its final quarter, becoming more like a crime thriller than a family drama or bildungsroman. It’s not completely unexpected – male violence towards women stalks the book throughout – but the totality with which Lish commits is shocking. That said, what occurs is extraordinary but not implausible, and he is as adept at handling murder and vengeance as he is the horrors of degenerative illness, the costly labyrinth of medical insurance, and the floundering of a teenager who, one way or another, loses everyone he cares about. At the end of the novel, when Corey decides his next move, it might not be what every reader wants for him, but it makes sense as the answer to a life of such cruel questions.
... a force, an epic coming-of-age tale filled with pain, heartache, fear, and undying love. When you think the story might turn one direction, it turns another. But what remains steadfast throughout is Corey’s devotion to his mother, his guttural need to do all he can to protect her. It is, however, a very long read, and at times, the story feels slow. But on the whole, Lish has crafted a compelling tale filled with complex and at times, frightening characters that will keep you intrigued.
... peopled with well-drawn characters who live in precarious economic circumstances ... Lish is a sensational literary craftsman, using the words in his toolbelt to construct narrative that is at once coolly dispassionate and red hot with emotion ... Suffice to say that the narrative descends into a level of violence for which I was unprepared. Corey is kicked around and abandoned in every sense of the word. I felt the book thinned out as it moved to its conclusion. I wasn't sure what the violence contributed to the world Lish had so painstakingly and masterfully built. Perhaps that is Lish's point. His Boston is one with seamy undersides and unhinged characters who act with malice and revenge. The result is a very dark novel ... I will be thinking about The War For Gloria for a long time. The book opens a disturbing window into a teenager's losing battle to save his mother, our broken healthcare system, the power that humans have to inflict harm on one another, and one boy's efforts to save not only his mother, but himself.
... a deeply immersive novel, steeped in tragedies — the chief one being characters who try to muscle their way through problems for lack of other ideas ... almost an unintentional satire of Great Men narratives, in which determined men move from strength to strength and climb a ladder to attainment. Here, Corey scraps and battles only to wind up in the same place he began ... Lish makes this kind of despair consistently engrossing, in part because he’s so rigorously poker-faced. Though he writes from an Olympian third-person, he delivers no commentary on his characters’ dilemmas, no winking pronouncements or broader messages.
Lish’s sentences are carved out of granite ...But the book is an unstable hybrid, unbearably poignant until it turns improbably pulpy, pitting a set of intricate characters against a pair of villains who seem to have escaped from a caricature factory managed by Charles Dickens in Hell ... The real war in this book may be between genres: elegy and bildungsroman on the one hand and gothic thriller on the other. The clash is fascinating ... I’ve lived in Cambridge and my grandfather lived in Quincy when I was a child in the Eighties, and I’ve never seen them evoked in such brilliant detail and with such total control on the page ... Lish’s writing about Corey’s work and his cage fighting displays a virtuosic level of detail as the boy undergoes trials and humiliations and learns how to keep his jobs and win his matches. Similarly fine is the attention Lish pays to Gloria’s decline: her falls, her loss of language, and at last her loss of mobility. The portrait is heartbreaking.
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. Above all, the portrait of toxic masculinity is stark, nearly to the point of caricature. Although this is a relentlessly depressing story, it is powered by remarkable empathy and humanity.
An unflinching and heartbreaking story ... 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.
