McGlue: A Novella

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Has there been an actual murder? Who left the note? Is the note even real? We are meant to be plunged into an ambiguous space between thriller, mystery and psychological drama. We may also be intended to regard the narrative as dark humour, as the note leads the narrator down a rabbit hole of circular and obsessional thoughts.

Sinha, R. & Friend, P. F. ( 1994) River systems and their sediment flux, Indo-Gangetic plains, Northern Bihar, India. Sedimentology, 41, 825– 845.

Shit,” I try to say, but the tenon’s got my tongue again. I look at Fag. His eyes are on his lap, reading lines. Michelle: Usually the other people in alcoholic relationships are codependent and need the chaos, but Johnson especially keeps him in chaos in a way and his mom doesn’t want or need him to still be around.

O'Shaughnessy - who has 28 previous convictions for 63 offences - admitted attempted robbery and possessing an offensive weapon.McGlue, imprisoned, sobers further, remembers more: Johnson talking about being done with old ties, going someplace where they both can make it. Vesta in her solitude soon conjures up a note writer she calls Blake, whom she thinks of as “the shaggy blond boy on the skateboard”, the kind a mother must chide. “Blake, clean your room. Blake, don’t be late for dinner.” She veers between conjuring complex lives for Blake and Magda and going on rambles with Charlie in the woods, dancing with Charlie in the kitchen, and wondering if she shares a mind with Charlie. Which leads her to deep thoughts such as: “I wondered what the mind was, actually.” This question goes to the heart of all Moshfegh’s fiction, from her 2014 novella McGlue, a feverish monologue by a drunken 19th-century sailor accused of murdering his wealthy gay lover; to her first novel Eileen, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2016, in which poor Eileen, living with her abusive alcoholic father, is as trapped as the boys in the prison where she works. It is most obvious in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which is set at the turn of the millennium and builds inexorably to 9/11. The narrator withdraws from the world, sustained only by Whoopi Goldberg movies and a panoply of pills, in the belief that if she can only sleep enough she will “become a whole new person”. “As summer dwindled, my sleep got thin and empty, like a room with white walls and tepid air conditioning.” He spotted a holdall hidden in a bush near Windermere Court, in Penrith Street, at around 11.30am, on November 26 last year.