McGlue

Editor’s Note

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If I fell in love with McGlue I would want to mother him, and that is unhealthy for both of us. He needs another mother like he needs another hole in the head. I’d certainly want him to cut back a lot on his drinking, and trick-turning, and take better care of himself in general — bathing and sleeping — but I also know that a significant portion of his massive charm, a golden tooth winking in the jaw of a skull, lies in the drastically poor choices he makes, choices poorer and poorer, led down the paths he’s led down, and the severity of his cruelty to himself and others, and the tragedies of his actions — the swiftness with which he follows his own soul down into the various drinks available to him, sea and blood and grog, mead, gin, wine. With where he came from — dirt — and where he’s headed — phantasmagoric hell — you’d think he’d find room for some redeeming faith in love or God or state. But not McGlue.

He does like to read, when he can get his hands on a text, and so do I, and that’s what keeps us together.

Shortly after I did fall, irrevocably, in love with McGlue, because he’s the kind of queer, socially maladjusted bad-boy who can always float my boat — if not his own — Rivka Galchen did too. It’s not every day that a publisher launches a book prize. The publisher has to cross her legs and hope that she, the judge she’s picked, will settle on something she, the publisher, can love. Rivka says: “A sextant of the psyche, McGlue works its grand knowing through the mouthfeel of language; it’s a sharply intelligent, beautiful, and singular novel. A scion of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Raymond Carver at once, Moshfegh transforms a poison into an intoxicant.”

Hawthorne is the salty courtroom and the bitter docks; Carver is the raw taciturnity and long-suffered loves, maternal and filial and consensual. The poison is drink, a non-literary addiction; the poison is poverty and other harsh, historically accurate conditions that make a boy reckless with those who might love him, with his mortal body and his eternal soul, that turn his soft heart into a sharp or dull knife, one that cuts both ways. The intoxicant is writing this brilliant.

Rebecca Wolff

Founder and Editor, Fence Books