A review by shimmer
Glitch by Lee Rourke

5.0

This is a deep, beautiful novel about grief and loss and love parental love. It takes those emotions on honestly and vividly but avoids the pitfalls of cliché. Protagonist L-J connects with his dying mother through abstract art, and poetry, and philosophy in a way that made me consider how rarely I see that kind of mother/son relationship depicted (or even see a mother character given that kind of intellectual life) instead of more common tropes. This is also a very smart novel about the the smoothness of systems, technical and emotional, and how a disruption accrues layers over time — like a piece of amber gathering itself over the years, or a fault in the electric grid upon which L-J makes his living, or like a family memory left unaddressed and unresolved to grow larger and more insurmountable in the future. And the novel's language keeps that idea of disruption, of glitch, in mind all along in the precise abstraction of referring to L-J's parents only as "Mother" and "Father," and the frequent use of quoted technical and medical and financial language when encountered between characters (as in conversations with doctors beside Mother's hospital bed). That style insists we recognize the mechanical or automated (literal and figural) systems we live in while calling attention to the constant disruptions they inevitably produce, and rethink easy assumptions about what is normal function and what is a glitch.