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 ... Mr. Lish’s sentences...are confident, loose jointed, strewn with essential detail ... There’s been a surfeit of wounded warriors in recent American fiction...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 ... This is a love story with a lot of ache in it ... This book is thick with the kind of sub-countertop-level detail that can’t be faked ... 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 ... The final chapters of this indelible book pulled my heart up under my ears.
Atticus Lish...has written a stunning, brilliant novel about the ignored underclass in America ... Foreboding hangs over this story from the first page ... Lish is merciless on the Chinese who are bent on making money and pay the lowest possible rates to vulnerable people like Zou Lei. There are no days off. This is a world which I doubt any writer has ever explored in such minute and telling detail ... Lish seems to have walked every street and every alley and every bar and every small business for miles around...His ear for working-class and military language is devastating (he came to writing after a spell as a marine and a spell as a Chinese translator), and his descriptions of life at ground level are both original and disturbing, and without proselytising. Every word, every encounter, rings true ... This is a wonderfully ambitious book, demanding and unflinching, and one of the finest novels I have read in years.
...astounding... It is a love story, a war story, a tale of New York City in which familiar streets become exotic, mysterious, portentous, foul, magnificent. Some of it reads like poetry. All of it moves with a breathless momentum ... The sense of place in the novel is so strong, so particular, and at the same time so boundless and indistinguishable from the world around it that Lish leaves you dizzy and disoriented in your own country, in your hometown ... Lish’s combination of glancing observations and throbbing rhythm is particularly powerful in his visions of war, creating an alarmingly straightforward, staccato blur of bewilderment and pain. This is a writer who hears his words, his sentences, his punctuation, who hears meter ... Lish’s passages are so resilient and unexpected that he seems to have discovered not just the dirt beneath the clichés, but the rich soil they’ve grown out of ... Atticus Lish has written a transcendent novel.
It is clear from the start that Preparation for the Next Life, the impressive debut novel by Atticus Lish, cannot have a happy ending. Illegal immigrant Zou Lei and Iraq war veteran Brad Skinner, both seeking refuge amid the wreckage of post-9/11 New York, come crashing together with the force of classical tragedy. Charged with breathless momentum, the book propels them towards a destiny as devastating as it is hopeful ... this is not a book driven by plot. Much of its beauty and insight into the ordinary dramas of life occurs in scenes that serve no larger narrative purpose, suggesting instead a journalistic will to record the fine-grained detail of New York’s immigrant neighbourhoods and the realities of exploitation and precariousness in the lives of America’s underclass. In his determination to narrate America from the bottom, Lish seems influenced as much by Dickens as by American modernists such as Ralph Ellison and John Dos Passos ... substantial and beguiling ... Lish’s tough lyricism ultimately works to dissolve the barrier between book and reader, co-opting us into a great, multi-ethnic nomadic clan ... This is, in the end, a profoundly political book.
...[an] astonishing, gorgeous and very upsetting debut novel ... How does Lish do it? ... It is hard to imagine a more daunting task for a novelist than to say something new about 9/11. Preparation for the Next Life is dizzying in its ambition and exhilarating in its triumph ... About a hundred pages in I closed it and walked around the room. A book hadn’t left me so breathless with its intensity — its inventive and detailed descriptions, its psychological surprise, its re-evaluation of values — since Gravity’s Rainbow. Then I picked it up again and read until the end ... [Lish] provides the most absorbing and detailed description I’ve read of the city’s underclass since Richard Price’s Lush Life.
[An] unlikely love story is the heart of this extraordinary novel ... 'Make it new' was Ezra Pound’s exhortation, a battle-cry that sounds a little tired these days. And yet Lish, in his detailed, unsparing and yet always sympathetic portrait of the lives under his consideration, does exactly that. How? By subsuming politics — this book certainly falls into the category of the 'post 9/11' novel — within the brilliantly observed, fully realised particulars of its characters’ everyday existence. And those particulars are both completely individual and yet, somehow, eternal ... This is a novel of clean, spare language, a book that allows you to feel the world it builds by showing you just what that world looks like. Anywhere Lish rests his gaze, he sees precisely: he chooses his scenes and settings with an unerring and original eye. Anywhere Lish rests his gaze, he sees precisely: he chooses his settings with an unerring and original eye. That would be enough to make this a good novel; what makes it a great novel is Lish’s human sensibility ... I was reminded, as I went along, of the way in which novelists such as Dickens and Zola created situations and lives that would, finally, begin to effect social change; it’s possible to think that this book might do something similar ... this novel is nothing less than a triumph, worthy of every heroic adjective a critic could throw. It is a reminder, plain and simple, of what fiction is for.
...as well as being a raw, sharply rendered love story, this is also a stark portrayal of immigration in modern-day New York, an unsparing autopsy of the degradations of the Bush years, and as ambitious and impressive a first novel as you could hope to find ... two misfits meet and forge an unlikely relationship – powerfully and unsentimentally rendered ... Preparation’s story, then, is essentially one of lovers battling against the odds. The novel’s success lies in the way that, within this slow-burning, fairytale narrative structure, it relentlessly depicts the scale of those odds and intently examines the lives of those outside the US’s social safety net ... part of what makes Lish’s novel work is the creation of a vividly-drawn, offbeat female heroine...she, like Skinner, becomes far more than the stock character she could have been ... The prose is confident, rhythmic, and obsessive in its accumulation of detail and the narrative eye stays at street level for long stretches, vividly conveying the gritty textures of deprivation ... Lish avoids sentimentality by limiting access to his characters’ thoughts and focusing instead on their raw and often painful experiences, and the resulting tale is sympathetic, disturbing and unusually powerful.
The 2015 novel I can’t believe I missed ... Lish is singularly alive to the ways that bodies are marked by experience ... Lish writes unnervingly well about violence. The nightmares that haunt Skinner’s sleep are conveyed with woozy intensity ... This unflinching physicality does not disguise how intently Lish gazes at symbolic horizons ... Although the novel is frequently sad to the point of despair, its power derives too from Zou and Skinner’s desperation to find goodness, hope and a future together ... Preparation for the Next Life is extraordinary, challenging and in its final quarter thrilling in ways Michael Connelly would envy. It is not perfect. Lish’s prose occasionally topples under its own weightiness ... But other passages live long in the memory ... Mostly, however, you remember Zou and Skinner, star-crossed lovers who cling to each other because there is no one else ... So simple, so heart-breaking, so very, very good.
The dirty realists – Carver’s school – were spare because spareness suited their purposes. Lish, writing about people a rung or two even further down the social ladder, wants to scrutinise the dirt, particle by particle. He isn’t catching a mood but building a world ... If Lish’s aim is to immerse the reader, then he succeeds. If his aim is to involve the reader, then he falters virtually every time he turns his gaze outwards from Zou Lei and Skinner to their environment. When the environment is an aspect of the characters, the result is vivid ... But too often, the approach is static and listy... And when Lish wants to remind the reader that this is the New York of modern history, we are visited by a more authorial, placidly informative voice ... It isn’t a smooth ride. But then we look to long novels for richness, not perfection, for power, not precision, so we should savour Lish’s audacity and open heart, his refusal to coddle or console, and forgive him the sin of excess.
Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life is this generation’s most significant novel about 'otherness.' ... Packed full of details, vivid descriptions, and unflinching honesty...a touching and brutal look at the way those on society’s margins manage to keep on dreaming while they struggle to survive ... Lish masterfully juggles a lot in this novel, but there are two items that stand out the most, confirming Preparation for the Next Life as one of the most powerful narratives of the year. The first is the unapologetic lack of sentimentality ... The other element that is truly outstanding is his ability to showcase his knowledge about everything from the city of New York to the unifying discourse of struggle and survival that most undocumented workers share ... The prose with which he communicates this familiarity is at once sharp and focused but also unhurried, unexpectedly elegant, and not afraid to explore that strange space outsiders share, a tense space where they are forced to communicate in a language they don’t fully dominate. Lish seems to be aware of what it means to be desperate, and this awareness allows him to recreate the streets of Queens, Zou’s job environment, and the Iraq war in vivid detail. It also allows him to create characters that feel real ... In a literary landscape that often favors narratives about well-off Caucasians enjoying what the city has to offer, Lish has crafted a masterpiece full of accents, religions, and grit, the building blocks used to create New York City ... Lish’s candid look at life on the wrong side of the tracks is both heartbreaking and beautiful and signals the arrival of a gifted voice with a knack for too-real fiction.
Lish...turns to fiction with this stunning debut novel that plumbs the underbelly of New York City ... Zou Lei and Skinner have their budding relationship tested by insurmountable odds, and their own foibles and peculiarities are rendered with vivid detail. Lish’s prose is at once raw and disciplined, and every word feels necessary.
Lish’s novel is angry but compassionate; he sees his characters clearly without romanticizing them or their impoverished experiences. His version of New York is garish, the accumulation of detail—the scum of forgotten food courts, people streaming from subways—becoming surreal. The prose feels in constant motion, and without quotation marks around any of the dialogue, the reader strains to hear the characters above the din. Nevertheless, Lish often avoids gloominess; there’s a velocity to his writing and moments of mundane, fleeting beauty ... A sledgehammer to the American Dream.
