Teenager Corey Goltz has it bad enough when his mother Gloria is diagnosed with ALS. A loving and dutiful son, he spends most of his high-school years by her side as her condition declines. Worse, Corey has to deal with the harmful presence of his father, Leonard, in his and Gloria's lives. Leonard and Gloria are estranged, with a past that Corey does not know much about. As Gloria's disease progresses, Leonard, an MIT security guard, becomes a near-permanent fixture in the house, fully revealing his misogynistic and psychopathic tendencies. Desperate for guidance, Corey tries to find a mentor every place he goes, with little success. As Gloria grows weaker, the relationship between Corey and his father stretches to the breaking point, and the novel moves into darker territory. 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.

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. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Sept.)

A teenage boy in suburban Boston faces his mother's illness and his father's darkness. Lish, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for his first novel, Preparation for the Next Life (2014), returns with a moody, atmospheric tragedy set in working-class Massachusetts. Gloria Goltz, a "thin, blonde-headed Janis Joplin" with feminist intellectual leanings and literary aspirations, dropped out of Lesley College in Cambridge when she fell under the spell and ultimately bore the son of MIT security guard and self-anointed supergenius Leonard Agoglia, whom she and her friends compare to Good Will Hunting. Though her attachment to Leonard never flagged, even during the many years they barely saw each other, his influence on her life was bleak. "She lost school, love, family, pride…her apartment....The portrait of depression dated from this time." As the book opens, their son, Corey, is 16. His mother, who has been raising him alone all this time, is about to get a diagnosis of ALS, engendering the return of his father to their lives. If that sounds like a nice thing, it definitely isn't--Leonard now definitively reveals himself to be Bad Will Hunting, if any kind of Will Hunting at all. This novel has two sides to its personality--on one side, it's a painfully yet beautifully detailed history of Corey and Gloria and their journey through her illness. (The author's mother was diagnosed with ALS when he was 15, and it seems unlikely that anyone with less immediate experience could have written this book. If you haven't had personal exposure to the disease, you'll learn why it's one of the cruelest ways to die.) On the other hand, in the third act, the novel becomes a Dennis Lehane--ish thriller, with brutal tabloid events piling up almost cartoonishly--but some readers will be too emotionally involved for cartoons at this point. Even those who find themselves rebelling against this aspect of the book will venerate Lish for pushing his vision to the limit and for producing sentences that seem to have been forged in some kind of roaring foundry. Haunting, horrifying, tender, and implacable. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.