Describing his late companion, of whose murder he has been accused, the titular sailor in McGlue complains, "He was just a student of misery. He had this idea that there was something like grace and victory to be found in ... choosing the worst." If one can study misery, Ottessa Moshfegh offers a master class with her debut, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Whether or not doom is chosen, the narrative proves there is, in fact, "something like grace" in watching it unfold.
Inhabiting the mind of a tortured character has the potential to be torturous, but Moshfegh--whose stories have been published in the Paris Review--unspools luminous, capable prose. In his first-person account of the days leading to his murder trial in 1850s Massachusetts, McGlue manages both drunken shambling and balletic grace as he waxes poetic about his adventures with the late Johnson, whom he may or may not have stabbed to death. Memory is suspect in the wake of innumerable flagons of booze and a head injury that won't heal.
The novella's most heartbreaking element, played like a card trick at the end of a high-stakes game, is the hint at a love affair between the duo. On a ship where one man is called "Fagger," McGlue and Johnson still play at heterosexuality, masking their revulsion during group visits to the whorehouse. The reader doesn't want for opportunities to wince; in a book this brutal, there are plenty, but the brutality is underpinned by exquisite prose, and a writer's empathy for a character awaiting his condemnation. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer and bookseller at Flyleaf Books