Preparation for the Next Life

Zou Lei is an undocumented immigrant from Xinjiang, in the far west of China, the daughter of a Uighur mother and a Han Chinese father. She comes to New York after a deportation scare to lose herself among people as illegal as she is, shares a room with other women, and works in low wage kitchen jobs in Flushing, Queens, doing exercises to keep up her strength. Brad Skinner, from Pennsylvania, is a veteran of the war in Iraq who hitchhikes to the city with scars on his back, nightmares and rages he cannot control. He rents a basement room in a house in Queens and drinks.

When they meet, the connection is immediate, and the novel becomes a love story between two people with almost nothing: Zou Lei living in fear of deportation, Skinner sliding deeper into his untreated trauma, the two of them making a home in his basement among pizza boxes and beer cans. Then the landlady's son, Jimmy, comes home from prison, a man who has learned nothing there but violence, and the book moves toward a catastrophe that only Zou Lei survives. Its last pages find her alone in the Southwest, still training, still talking to Skinner.

Lish writes without quotation marks, in dense, restless prose that piles up the grime of the city, the food courts and the subway crowds, until it becomes almost hallucinatory. Kirkus called it "a love story set in the sewers of the American dream" and thought it "a little too long, a little too overwhelming," which is fair warning: it is slow and punishing in stretches, and the ending is hard to bear. Dwight Garner in the New York Times called it "perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade," and Cathleen Schine in the New York Review of Books wrote that "Atticus Lish has written a transcendent novel." Not everyone agreed; Jamie Fisher in Cleaver called it "a middling book." It suits patient readers who want the country seen from its bottom rung.