Preparation for the Next Life
Atticus Lish
Oneworld Publications
Atticus Lish’s debut novel draws a powerful narrative from an unlikely pairing. Immigrant Zou Lei is smuggled into the States over the Mexican border in a truck, having made her way from China. She arrives in New York ‘carrying a plastic bag and shower shoes, a phone number, waiting beneath an underpass, the potato chips long gone, lightheaded.’ Determined not to return to jail, where she spent three months for her illegal status, she works a series of exploitative, gruelling jobs in fast-food restaurants for slave wages, doing calisthenics exercises during her lunch breaks. Brad Skinner arrives in New York after serving in Iraq, with his army issue handgun and army-issued antidepressants, tranquilisers, psychotics, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety and sleeping pills, shrapnel in his back and a nightmare in his head. A love of physical exercise first mutually attracts the two, and they form a ‘two-person unit’ to combat his worsening mental state and her illegal status, and to carve out a life together, American dream style (or something like that). It’s not exactly a recipe for a happy ending, particularly with the introduction of Brad’s landlady’s son, a ex-convict who has emerged from prison a thoroughly brutalised, ultra-violent white supremacist. It is however a recipe for hope, for a kind of happiness, and for a love all the more compelling for its lack of sentimentality.
Preparation for the Next Life takes on some of the United States’ most glaring government policy failures: immigration, the penal system, traumatised war veterans. This equally exhilarating and terrifying book rips these deficiencies apart with a fury and clarity rarely to be found. But its anger at a society that has systematically failed its most vulnerable is never didactic and never self-righteous. Instead of preaching about the problems faced by the inhabitants of this marginalised world, Lish simply absorbs us in it. It’s a sprawling, epic read filled with minute detail of what it is to live at the very edge of stability: energetic, powerful, compassionate and devastating.
Words: Liza Cox
