Book Review of "Preparation for the Next Life"

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE

By Atticus Lish

417 pages. Tyrant Books. $15.

Revised by Dwight Gardner of NYT

Atticus Lish’s first novel, “Preparation for the Next Life,” is unlike any American fiction I’ve read recently in its intricate comprehension of, and deep feeling for, life at the margins. 

This is an intense book with a low, flyspecked center of gravity. It’s about blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food, bad options. At its knotty core, amazingly, is perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade. It’s one that builds slowly in intensity, like a shaft of sunlight into an anthracite mine.

One of this novel’s two central characters is Zou Lei, who works in the kitchen of a forgettable Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens. She’s an ethnic Uighur from northwest China, and the other workers don’t understand her language. She finds a blackened mattress in an overcrowded rooming house. She seems like the loneliest person alive.

Zou Lei slipped into America; she has no papers. Here are the first two paragraphs of Mr. Lish’s novel, which tell a shred of her story. They also show off Mr. Lish’s sentences, which are confident, loose jointed, strewn with essential detail.

“She came by way of Archer, Bridgeport, Nanuet, worked off 95 in jeans and a denim jacket, carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.

“They picked her up on the highway by a plain white shed, a sign for army-navy, tires in the trees. A Caravan pulled up with a Monkey King on the dash and she got in. The men took her to a Motel 8 and put her in a room with half a dozen other women from Fookien and a liter of orange soda. She listened to trucks coming in all night and the AC running.” 

So begins a particular kind of American story. It includes a scary stint in prison (the Patriot Act, in this novel, is a phrase of dread), and a series of dead-end jobs. Zou Lei rides the subway selling bootleg DVDs, which she fans out. She looks at the other riders and says: “Deeweedee, deeweedee. Hello, deeweedee.”

The other central character in “Preparation for the Next Life” is Skinner, an injured, tattooed, depressed and mentally unbalanced veteran of three tours in Iraq. He takes a basement apartment in Queens, with fitness magazines, pornography and pizza boxes spread around his bed.

There’s been a surfeit of wounded warriors in recent American fiction, and his arrival worried me; these men can, in lesser hands, be stock characters. Not here. The encrusted detail in Mr. Lish’s prose flicks the switch on in every sentence. Here is Skinner approaching his new apartment for the first time:

“One of the houses had its postage-stamp yard filled with statues and figurines — of elves, wise men, the crucifixion, leprechauns, animals, plastic flowers, a sleigh, a whirligig that spun in the wind. There were wind chimes on the porch and an American flag bumper sticker for 9/11 on the house. This was where he was going.” 

Skinner and Zou Lei — he calls her Zooey — don’t meet cute. He bumps into her while looking for an erotic massage. They bond in part over their shared love of working out, intense sessions that are like purification rituals, sessions that are almost the only thing that makes sense to them. They become one more unlikely couple in Flushing, “going home to open a Styrofoam shell in the dark, eat something hot together.” 

Skinner is a decent man who does bad things. He doesn’t trust himself. He sometimes treats Zou Lei badly. This is a love story with a lot of ache in it. He tells her to shut up and, Mr. Lish writes, “this pulled the power cord right out of her.” She accuses him of thinking she is “some garbage person,” just another piece of unwanted human biology. 

Mr. Lish has taught English in Central Asia, and he works as a Chinese-English translator of technical material. He’s a former Marine who, according to his biography, has held a long series of blue-collar jobs. 

I don’t doubt his résumé: This book is thick with the kind of sub-countertop-level detail that can’t be faked. He also arrives with a literary pedigree. His father is Gordon Lish, the writer and influential editor, most famously of Raymond Carver.

Atticus Lish has written a necessary novel, one with echoes of early Ken Kesey, of William T. Vollmann’s best writing and of Thom Jones’s pulverizing short stories.

His writing about Queens is superb. The graffiti-covered steel gates on businesses at night “resembled a thousand tattooed eyelids.” Flushing is where you see a hard glint in people’s eyes, “the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.” 

He’s just as good on Skinner’s memories of war. “The explosion leaped out of the road and rose like batwings. In the following vehicle, Skinner’s ears popped and cut off like overloaded speakers.” 

Neither Zou Lei nor Skinner is particularly religious. Yet she is a Muslim, and “Preparation for the Next Life” takes its name from a saying on the doorway of a mosque she enters at one point. This novel helps one understand the appeal of ready-made answers to life’s vexations.

Zou Lei is optimistic, in the face of the odds, about where life is dragging her. After all, things are worse back in China. She is a fierce patriot of a sort. She thinks to herself: “The N.Y.P.D. would not stop her. If they scanned her, they would see an American flag under the scan.” 

The N.Y.P.D., as it happens, may be the least of her concerns. The final chapters of this indelible book pulled my heart up under my ears.