The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

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.

Release date: September 7, 2021

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 464

Sample

1

Woman, Earth, Sun and Richard Feynman

You never think about nerves and breathing. You take breathing for granted. You take the nerves under your skin or under the skin of another animal for granted.

His mother loved him. Gloria said, “You make me laugh.” He had a sense of humor about their lives, apparently. She was a single mother and he helped her collect her library off the streets of Boston and never complained about it. They went through crates of books together and shared what they found. Her boy was never bored, even living in her car.

She came from Springfield, which she called her shitty little city. She had come to Boston to go to college. She wanted to stand on the shoulders of Germaine Greer, the author of Sex and Destiny. She gave birth to Corey at Mass General during what should have been her final year of college.

She crashed in Cleveland Circle, Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill—just her and her son—and her ever-changing roommates. For a time, they stayed at a triple-decker house in Dorchester and he went to a school where a good half the other kids were from the Cape Verde islands. Corey showed his mom the islands on the map, Boa Vista and Santiago off the coast of Senegal, telling her that he’d be sailing here someday when he grew up and went to sea.

He had learned about the concept of a vessel from living in his mother’s car. He had fastened on the concept early. Maybe it was always in his head, one of the basic concepts he was born with—woman, earth, sun, boat.

Her full name was Gloria Goltz. In his mind, she was always a bright blonde. He saw her as having a glass jaw that she kept putting up and it kept getting cracked. But when it came to him, she was stalwart. Once, she took him to a KFC and the manager didn’t want to give her another biscuit with her order, but she demanded it because Corey loved biscuits—he had read that sailors ate hardtack and salt pork—and the manager, with his thin arms and striped shirt, relented.

“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 street musicians who drifted in with the pigeons, carrying guitars, wearing bowler hats and German army trench coats, the wet stink of the bathroom around the corner and the weird men playing chess all day; the hoboes from Seattle, skinheads in suspenders saluting in the street, a dyed Mohawk the size of a circular saw blade from a lumber mill atop a gaunt bald head, kids from the wealthy towns of Concord and Lexington exploring new identities as bitter waifs, at night a wolf pack of multiracial youths from Dorchester, one a white boy wearing a shirt saying That Funky Cypress Hill Shit, there to sell drugs. Her skinny legs. She had dropped out of school. She had hung out in The Pit at Harvard Square, sitting cross-legged in striped tights on the granite wall, her eyes mascaraed, her mouth painted black, debating with her fellow anarchists, giving the finger to the square—the bank, the bricks, the Coop, the clock, the privilege and hypocrisy. The scream of rage was at herself.

So sometimes as the years passed, she’d look at herself and the weight of the time and the evidence of who she was would hit her and she’d get high and ask, “Will it ever be okay?” And for some reason her son would tell her, “Hey, Mom, don’t be sad. You’re great. You’re greater than you know.”

Gloria didn’t just gather things; she left them behind too. She couldn’t keep things as they moved. They lost his toys, his clothes. She cared more than he did, because of the stupid money. She did a self-portrait when she was painting and left it in a closet in Jamaica Plain. Poems too. On the white wall of a room in a house that someone else was renting, she had written in paint “Forgive. This Is the Unimpeachable Voice of God. Let Your Seeing and Your Listening Come from Total Self.” She had lost and gained. An exchange with the city. A coming and a going. The word was many—jobs, roommates, beds, ideas—so many it took a historian to remember. Each year was a miniature history enforcing nonattachment and surprise. Her obsessions and searches for solutions lasted a while and burned out, and they were legion too. And then she returned to them like she might return to a used record store in Allston. She might write a song or pick up paints again, and the feeling she would temporarily have would make her think she never should have dropped this, that doing so had been her worst mistake; here was the answer after all.

As her son grew, he began developing a sharp boyish face. To her, it evoked a primitive axe-head, chipped from flint by, say, the Algonquin Indians. He had a small, round, aerodynamic cranium, like a cheetah. The front of his face—his nose, maxilla, sinuses, jaw—projected forward like a canine skull—what an anthropologist would call prognathous. His blond hair grew in a short, tight cap on his head, like Julius Caesar or Eminem. And he had freckles.

Here was her poem, she thought. How had she forgotten?

She was already a thin woman, as if she had already had the fundamental things taken away from her, like food or love when she’d needed it. But that was how she chose to eat; she was vegan. She gave the usual double-headed reason: It was healthier for her/better for the planet. Cattle ranching destroys the forests, pollutes the rivers, adds to the greenhouse effect. Her cool blue world of wind, air, forest was in retreat from the hot red screaming dying blood-reeking slaughter world.

Was she afraid of her father’s anger or his body? Or was it her hatred of her own blood and meat that was at the heart of it—that drop of blood on the bathroom floor? Or it could have been genetic. She was flat-chested and narrow-shouldered, built for yoga.

Yoga, she knew, was an Indo-European word that meant “to yoke”—to yoke the body and the spirit together by means of the breath. The breath contained the energy called prana. The prana circulated through the body like an ocean current. The circling of the prana-current made the body healthy, just as the circling of the ocean currents made the planet healthy. If you stopped the tide, the earth would die.

The circulation was like the blood but was not the blood. The energy flowed through silver meridians and a sun that was not the sun glowed in the sacral plexus. It was a moon. To her sacral meant “sacred,” the sacred female moon.

Eggs were okay to eat as long as they were harvested humanely.

These were some of her beliefs as she approached the end of her life.

She had long white legs, and when she put on her leotard and did yoga, you could see her rib cage and the bones of her spine counting up her back to her skull, housing the anterior horns of the cervical ganglia.

His memories were fragmented and out of order. If he reached across his sea of memories, he found a scattering of islands, like crumbled cookies, with no first one, in no chronological order.

In one of his earliest memories, he saw his mother in a kitchen and he could smell smoke and burning cheese. She was wearing giant overalls. Her arms were bare, her armpits were unshaven, you could see the sides of her breasts. She was cooking tofu pups in a skillet. Her blonde hair was covered by a bandana like Aunt Jemima on the pancake box. Brown paper grocery bags stood on the floor, filled with tea leaves and carrot peelings. You could smell the wet brown paper of the bags.

She sat down on the floor with him and put her legs in the lotus position. A panting dog came in and licked the pan while they were eating, and she hugged it and fed it a tofu pup.

They were living with musicians, who had blond curly beards and blond dreadlocks and wooden plugs in their earlobes like the Gautama Buddha. They looked like the Spin Doctors from the “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes” videos—tall, lanky white men who said they dreamed of ending racism.

They lived in a bad neighborhood—the apartment must have been in Mission Hill—and they were worried about getting robbed. Corey slept alone in a back room where the musicians stored their instruments. His cot faced a window with a security gate; the window faced an alley. Someone had climbed the fire escape and tried to break in and steal the musicians’ guitars and drums while his mother was in the house alone.

Corey got sick and had to stay in bed for a long time. While he was lying there, his mother came in and climbed on the windowsill and stood on her tiptoes, stringing up Tibetan prayer flags over him. She hammered nails in the ceiling and tied the string of flags to the nails. The sun was flooding in the gated window and shining through her dress.

She got a TV from the musicians and put it at the foot of his bed. He watched a cartoon show called Action Man. The superheroes were extreme athletes and they were after an evil scientist who had a luxury yacht armed with a nuclear missile. The hero water-skied behind a rocket-powered speedboat, which turned into a submarine. It shot underwater and sped around a coral reef. It blasted out of the water and turned into a fighter plane. Careening through G-forces, the hero went through every medium—water, air and land—his wake pluming up behind him. His success depended on acrobatic physical control. Accidents happened; racecars spun in circles, planes got wrecked, and he’d have to eject. When the hero got injured, he said his arm was tweaked. He’d use his one good arm instead to save the day. “Go for it, Action Man!” his team said. Corey loved the way they talked. Their voices were so positive and strong.

There was something that spoke to Corey in the way that Action Man talked about his injured arm as if it were a piece of machinery that could be fixed. The word tweaked isolated the damage, confining it to a limb, unlike the phrase “I’m hurt,” which potentially meant the entire person and all the suffering they could feel, including loneliness and fear.

He’d had a dream while he was sick, one that recurred throughout his childhood. He imagined he was trapped in a wooden closet; he was very small and he could not get out. His mother was on the other side of the closet door, which had been slammed shut and locked, and he couldn’t get to her; he was locked in—or out, rather—locked away from her. There was a suffocating silence. He tried to climb out the window but couldn’t reach the sill. He knew his mother was in trouble because he could hear her muted voice pleading—but whomever she was speaking to wouldn’t listen to her. The house was made of lacquered pine, which could catch fire and burn them to death in an instant. The air was combustible with turpentine vapor. They were in the remote countryside, miles away from help.

The dream would not go away. It felt like a memory. He assumed it was something he had imagined, brought on by fever, but he was never sure it wasn’t real.

There had always been something he should have known but somehow didn’t. There had always been a sea he couldn’t cross inside his mind.

He remembered his mother taking him to a first communion in the basement of a church when he was small. The church was where, he couldn’t say; somewhere in the Boston area, like Saugus maybe. He remembered asking his mother what a communion was and Gloria telling him, “It’s a Catholic religious ceremony.” She put on high heels and lipstick for it. They met a man at the party. Everyone was standing by a table with bowls of potato salad and platters of sandwiches and helium balloons except the man, who stood at the back of the party, not like a guest but as if he worked there like a janitor. His mother told Corey to say hello, not to be a stranger. The man spoke to him and Corey didn’t understand what he was saying. The man explained it was because he was talking to him in pig Latin.

She invited the man over to their house to play chess with her. Later, Corey asked who he was and she said, “You know him. That’s your father.”

The man who was supposed to be Corey’s father acted more like an uncle or a family friend who would see them for the occasional weekend. Sometimes, he’d drop in wherever they were staying and meet Gloria’s roommates, who tended to be shocked by his intellect. Sometimes, Corey and Gloria would have to drive to meet him. Gloria would navigate out into the rural suburbs of farm stands, cornfields, office parks and the commuter rail, to a highway strip mall—and there he’d be, wearing tinted sunglasses like a Mafioso, waiting to buy them ice cream.