Preparation For The Next Life

I'm from Flushing, Queens, and Lish really really captured it. Albeit the seediest part of it, but also the colors, the architecture, the people, the smells, the sounds, the feeling. Unfortunately, all I can think about is the grisly rape scene about 3/4 of the way through, when Jimmy visits the masseuse. I've never been able to decide exactly how I feel about trigger warnings, since I've never been exposed to anything I've ever read that I found particularly triggering, even if it was gruesome (McCarthy, articles by that dude who hung around the Mexican border for many years whose name escapes me) but this freaking scene, as someone put it on Reddit, "eclipsed" the rest of the book for me. I wish I had never read that scene, truly. For that reason, I can only give the novel as a whole 3 stars. I guess I could give it 5 if I were basing my opinion purely on literary achievement, or 4 if I wanted to be picky about editing, but that one scene was just way too disturbing for me. And I grew up with the internet. But somehow, I've now realized, nothing is more disturbing than evocative writing and your own imagination. One of the most disturbing things I've ever read tbh. Hence the 3-stars. Read it, for sure. The more detached from that world, the more you have a responsibility to get to know it. But if you're squirmy about rape, and you'll know when it's about to happen, just skip that scene. I wish I had.

This is a stunning piece of work and I am sorry to see that it has made very few sales despite the awards and the reviews. Some of the reviewers didn't do it any favors with the 'the American dream is dead' business and 'crushing oppression of the lives of illegal immigrants' because people are getting head-shy about propaganda. Who needs an author telling readers how dreadful America is yet again. But the writing is more than exceptional; it is superb. I am at the point of gushing. The streets are a living river of types, sorts, activity, color, woodsmoke from shish-kebabs roasting over charcoal, herb medicine bodegas, Chinatown languages, written with passion and delight.Part of the brilliance of the writing is Lish's love for his characters and setting and part that he is simply gifted. A kind of passionate commitment gives an airborne quality to his prose. There are rewards in every paragraph: "The whole street was meseras bars with Central American men sitting stone drunk at the tables, their hoods over their heads, holding forties, using the bottle to climb up like a bannister'. And 'There were clotheslines hanging on second-story decks. Hanging in the dark he saw a flag with a crescent moon. A blue flickering light showed in a window and they heard gunshots, sirens, and muffled music'. He never tries for effect or twists language in order to extract some poetic quality, it's spare and quick. A relief from the flat, inert prose of Eggars and Tartt et al.The two main characters start out well, and then unfortunately fall into the trap of the passive victim character (in the main, it is Skinner the vet who is passive victim here) and a passive victim cannot carry the weight of a long narrative which is a common problem and probably the reason the book has not sold well despite much boosting. The whole structure collapses; the main character, the Pitiful Victim, cannot carry the weight of a narrative for very long if at all. A story simply cannot maintain its momentum, without agency, without brains, without energy. So the writer sees that his/her story is bagging out at the bottom and the easy solution is to have more and more horrible things happen to the Victim character in order to keep up the tension or the interest.However this does not really work. The readers gets compassion fatigue and thinks, 'do something to help yourself!'. A fatal thought. Then the writer has to work up elaborate circumstances as to why the Victim *cannot* help themselves. The world is too harsh, circumstances are too difficult, the Army refuses medical help and so on. Skinner rents a basement room from some very evil and entertaining rednecks (as usual the evil ones are given the agency, strength cunning etc. as opposed to our limp hero) and they become more and more threatening and evil. Why doesn't he move out? Get another room somewhere, get away from them! Why doesn't he marry Zooey, the Chinese immigrant girl? She's a treasure. And then the reader starts trying to write the book for the author. And then gives up.The main character, Skinner the vet, therefore gets stupider as the book progresses.An additional problem is the clichés; there must be hundreds of books and movies both casting US soldiers as clumsy oafs, low IQ, and sometimes outright savages who wander amidst apocalyptic smoking ruins and are blown up by IEDs and only fight civilians. I can't recall one scene in any of these fictional narratives where US soldiers are up against an armed and competent enemy and yet they all come home with serious PTSD (which in the main comes from being shot at and fighting for your life) and at home begin a long program of drink and failure. The author states that a soldier with traumatic brain injury is returned to combat. I don't believe it. Message: the US army is evil, George Bush is the Evil Lord of All Evilness,no one recovers from PTSD, etc. etc. Readers have also been burnt out on these themes. All men who have been in combat have PTSD going back to the Paleolithic but the import of all the present novels of Iraq is that our current generation of soldiers is more fragile, stupider, less resilient than all the generations before. This started with Vietnam and nothing had changed in the fictional world in 50 years. it's like a stage set an author can rent out; Wars To Go. The relationship of this theme to reality is tenuous; as a commenter on the book Yellow Bird said, "Being shot at is fun. Shooting back is even more fun".The girl is a delight; she is a lively and good young woman, quick as mercury and charming. Love is hard to come by in literary fiction; (LitLit.) I am grateful for her presence. (even though it is another current cliché; strong woman, weak, damaged man). Lish's gift for the written word is so extensive that he can swing into the language of folk tales with ease, it is convincing, hypnotic. The symbols in these folk tales guard her and guide her throughout the book. It works beautifully.So they skid right on down to Sadville to the required awful ending. Zooey goes on a epic journey on foot through New York and the boroughs searching for Skinner like a female Orpheus trying to rescue a male Euripides from hell. It is gripping because of her.A hero narrative is a intriguing question. Does a hero have to be a low-IQ kill machine? Do they have thoughts? Frontal lobes? Writers seem confused by this question except for girl heroes in PopLit, who kill people deader than mackerels and hike many miles carrying a heavy narrative and seem intelligent. Why can men not be heroes? You wonder. Epics going back to the Bronze Age and I am sure beyond supply templates and even beyond the fighting business there are moments of deep insight. For instance Joshua on his way to take Jericho. "When Joshua came to Jericho he lifted up his eyes and looked and there stood a man with his sword drawn in his hand. And Joshua said, 'Are you for us or for our enemies?' and the man said, 'Neither. But as commander of the forces of the Lord I am now come'." This cosmic even-handedness is chilling. And it brings a third party into the equation. It takes some thinking about. But Jericho fell. That's the story.

Three quarters of the way through this beautifully grim depiction of life at the bottom, Zou Lei, an illegal immigrant who lives in fear of being thrown in jail again, of losing her barely paying backbreaking job, of seeing Skinner, the physically and mentally scared Iraq war vet who she has fallen in love with fail to surface from his overmedicated nightmares, meets a Muslim who wants to save her.He wants her to come back to the religion she learned a bit about growing up dirt poor in rural Western China: “But, he said , you cannot have these beautiful things if you lead a bad life, if you are sinning, doing what you want. Of course you must live properly and obey the law. He pointed at the bilingual Arabic and English sign over the mosque’s doorway, which he read aloud for her. It said Preparation For The Next Life.”This may be one of the few places in the book in which the author intrudes to include irony. Instead author Atticus Lish describes in loving detail the blasted housing projects, the unending trips for fast food, the meaningful meaningless of running and hiding through the demotic argot of those from Latin America, China, Afghanistan, as they try to survive in the outer orbit of New York City. The title of the book, however points to one of the few times that anything even remotely redemptive enters into the minds of the characters or the unfolding of a plot that we know, from the beginning, will not end well for some. Zou Lei is far more sinned against than sinning. In fact she is far more holy than most who have shrines. Skinner, however, haunted by demons, fights for a soul he lost in the killing zones. Others have lost their souls in prison or in the pursuit of money. The redemptive act of running may be the way of escaping dark thought. Zou Lei is always running, figuratively and literally. Her story is in some ways an update of Huck Finn-- a mattress for raft and then lighting out for the territories--and in this she may be more American than most of us.The book has earned some rave reviews for its poetic prose put into service to give the largely voiceless to the voiceless. It’s not as if there are not millions who speak and live like Lish depicts; it’s just that they don’t write books or appear often in the media except when they are arrested or are themselves the victims of crimes. Lish’s sentences are clear and clean but also have a ‘deluging onwardness’ that makes what happens seems fated.For those who want to read a writer using all his skills to bring readers into this world that so few seems prepared for, then I would encourage you to read this book. It is one of the better novels I have read in the past few years.

The writer, very capably, gives one wonderfully descriptive "slices of life" that are tangent to the story of how two very different people's lives merge, but he does so at the expense of moving the story along at a pace that is enjoyable to the reader. Too often, for my tastes anyway, I found myself having to wade through paragraph upon paragraph of descriptive prose that rather than adding to the story, seemed to muddy the waters of the 2 protagonist's journey. The story itself, when I could find the thread of it through the extraneous "asides," was interesting, and timely, in-so-far as speaking to the issue of the struggles a great number of our returning servicemen and women have when trying to re-enter society after service in a theater of war. A decent read, but way to wordy for my tastes.

Emotional, beautifully written. Essentially a love story told in a unique way without chocolates and roses, bare raw love. The trials of two people barely surviving in Mew York

A modern day Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps a tribute often made but this is the real deal.I struggled at first with the staccato text before I realised that it was my own laziness that was preventing my from seeing the beauty in the writing.A book of great significance and skill. A book about which I continue to think, likely for some time yet.Thanks Atticus.

This is my first Amazon book review, but I read a lot of books & wanted to add to the reviews of this book. This is a very absorbing story, and the details & colour of the characters, experiences and settings are painted superbly - sparing and vivid all at once. You will care for the main characters. You will be absorbed in their existence. You will see sides of life you are probably oblivious to. You will enjoy reading the writing. You'll finish it and be unable to let it finish. Recommended.

A brilliant feat, amazing book shows you the life many people live in New York, an angle you never see in mainstream American productions, not an easy read, but excellently done and well worth a read!