Preparation for the Next Life

Compelling, raw, bleak and powerful. It is almost difficult to describe this tale as fiction because it feels so real when you are in it. Lish's narrative is stripped-down and unrelenting and holds you in his dystopian reality until the final page.

People may think that before Trump came along, immigrants had it easy. It's just that we weren't paying attention. This book makes us feel the pain of those we were able to ignore before it became fashionable, not in a sentimental or politically motivated way, but a human one. These are lives I wasn't prepared for.

I was finishing Atticus Lish’s novel “Preparation for the Next Life” in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. When the nurse called me back, she said, “Do you enjoy reading inspirational books?” It took me a second, and then I smiled, “Oh, no. It’s a novel. Very bleak. About a vet with PTSD and an illegal immigrant from China.” Her expression suggested she didn’t want to hear more. Kirkus Reviews describes the book as “a sledgehammer to the American dream,” and that’s as apt and concise a summary as you’ll find. It’s an intense, unsentimental book about two people clinging to each other and living on the edge in Queens, barely surviving. Zou Lei is a Uighur from northwestern China who enters the US show more illegally. She’s soon arrested, and put in a detention center without any indication of if or when she’ll be released. Three months later, she’s back on the streets, scouring Flushing’s Chinatown for work and a place to stay. Brad Skinner is a US Army vet just discharged after his third tour of combat duty in Iraq, with scars on his back from shrapnel and severe PTSD. At the start of the book, he’s hitching a ride into NYC with a trucker. Three or four days after he arrives in the city, he’s looking for a massage parlor mentioned in a flyer he’s been handed on the street and runs into Zou Lei sitting on the fire stairs outside the basement noodle takeout place where she works. A relationship between them develops, apparently over their shared need for strenuous physical activity (running, weight lifting) to transport them from their difficult lives. Skinner takes a basement room in Queens and, when the landlady’s son Jimmy is released after a 10-year prison sentence, he puts himself into conflict with Skinner and Zou Lei. This conflict culminates in a chilling suspenseful scene that ultimately brings the novel to a close.

The book’s title is derived from an episode toward the end of the book when Zou Lei arrives at work to find that her hours have been cut to zero. Skinner is not home, and she is wandering the streets half-heartedly trying to find work. She stumbles hungry and thirsty into a grocery run by a Uzbek from Afghanistan whose wife leads her to a boarded-up house next door that serves as a mosque where she’s able to get a meal after attending the service. The mullah wants to convert her and points to a sign over the doorway that says, “Preparation for the Next Life.”Lish’s repeated spare graphic descriptions of the city’s squalor – the broken glass on the sidewalks, the graffiti, the subways, the projects, the boarded up houses, the street people – can get a bit mind-numbing, but he effectively conveys the hopelessness in the lives of everyone in the book. I kept wondering how he could know so much about his characters. In the photo on the back of the book, he looks like he could have just gotten out of the military. It turns out, according to a piece in the New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten (December 1, 2014), Lish was in the Marines, had a basement apartment in Queens, held a series of fast food jobs, taught English in China, and his wife is Asian (albeit a Korean-born schoolteacher). Also, it turns out he is the son of the famous editor Gordon Lish and thus had a privileged childhood and possibly a good dose of literary DNA. Regardless, “Preparation for the Next Life” is a stunning novel and well worth reading. show less

Zou Lei, an undocumented Asia woman, meets Skinner, a returning Iraq veteran with PTSD. Lish has an incredible eye for the details of the underbelly of the city from sweatshops to bus terminals to bodegas. This is a 21st century love story. It is a sad tale, but not heartbreaking because we know from the beginning that this match is doomed.

Lish takes us on an arduous, real time, step-by-step journey through the boroughs, made even more exhausting because it appears clear that Zou Lei’s and Skinner’s affair will end badly.

A gritty, compelling, unsentimental story about people who seldom get to hold center stage.

Very good books have an emotional impact. Then there are rare books that are so powerful that you have emotional memories of the experience of reading them. "Preparations for the Next Life" is in the latter category. in telling the tragic love story of Skinner and Zou Lei, two lost humans, one a PTSD-suffering Iragi-War veteran, the other, a struggling undocumented Uiger immigrant, Atticus Lish has crafted something both startlingly original while at the same time recalling the heavyweights of American literature: Faulkner, Morrison, Flannery O'Conner, Cormac McCarthy.

Lish manages to touch so many hot button issues: race, religion, class, immigration without ever discussing them. He just tells a powerful story, a difficult story, a show more story in lesser hands would fall to pieces in cliche or stereotype. Lish accomplishes this through an attention to the details in the lives of his characters and the streets they wander with an attention to detail so intense it feels at times almost pathological. The portrayal of the city of New York, the neighborhood of Flushing in particular, is part Dickens, part Delillo. show less

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish is a difficult book to rate. This is not due to any flaws but to the fact that a book that presents some very ugly truths can also be a very beautiful book.

This is a dark and often depressing book about the illusion that is "The American Dream." Whether one is an undocumented foreigner who is working hard or an American born and raised war veteran with PTSD, there are more things working against you than for you. To say the descriptions are bleak is almost an understatement.

Having said all of that, this book is beautiful in it's rendering of hopelessness. Dreams for advancement and happiness easily become a simple desire to survive without hassle. People, all people, need someone(s) or we show more can go crazy in our struggles. This novel portrays that need and all of the difficulties inherent in having such a necessity in our life.

This should be read by everyone, in my opinion, simply so that we can all understand the difficulties our fellow human beings suffer daily. Aside from that sweeping statement, I think readers who don't mind bleak as long as it speaks to the human condition will enjoy this book. I am not sure those who read for entertainment only will want to read this, though they will be rewarded if they choose to tough it out.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing. show less

A devastating book - challenging and eye-opening, especially for those of us with lives of comfort and money and freedom and opportunity and safety. A brilliant and true picture of the way America us today. Every high school and college student should read it, as adult-themed and 'unsuitable' as it is for younger readers, as well as every book group. None of them would like it but all would be moved and educated by it.