Novels for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context and Criticism on Commonly Studied Novels (Novels for Students, 61)

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Preparation for the Next Life

Atticus Lish

2014

Preparation for the Next Life is a novel by American author Atticus Lish, published in 2014. Set in Queens, New York, the book tells the story of a romance between Brad Skinner, an American veteran of the US war with Iraq who suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder, and Zou Lei, a Chinese illegal immigrant. The novel vividly depicts the teeming life in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York among people who live at the lower end of the economic spectrum. It shows the insecure life of the undocumented immigrant and reveals also, through Skinner's flashbacks, the horrors of war, as well as the desperate condition of someone suffering from severe symptoms of PTSD. The love story is a touching one, although in keeping with the gritty tone of the novel as a whole, it does not have a happy ending.

Atticus Lish was born in 1972 in New York City. His father was Gordon Lish, a noted literary editor and teacher of writing. Lish attended Phillips Academy, a private school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied Chinese. He then attended Harvard University, studying mathematics, but he dropped out after two years and worked at several menial jobs before enlisting in the US Marine Corps. After serving for a year and a half, he was honorably discharged. In 1995, he married a schoolteacher named Beth, who was born in South Korea. They had met during his time at Harvard.

Lish developed an interest in mixed martial arts and trained for six years before becoming a professional fighter. He won one fight and lost the next one, before deciding to return to Harvard to complete his degree. In the summer of 2004, he took a writing course at Harvard, which ignited an interest in writing. In 2005, Lish and his wife taught English for a year in China and then returned to New York, living in Brooklyn, where Lish worked as a technical translator from Chinese to English.

In 2012, a small publisher, Tyrant Books, published Lish's book Life Is with People , a collection of drawings with captions. At the time, Lish was also working on Preparation for the Next Life , which he had begun in 2008. The book took him five years to complete. Published in 2014, also by Tyrant Books, it was awarded the Plimpton Prize for Fiction in 2015 and also the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year. As of 2018, Lish is working on another novel, but he declines to talk about it until it is complete.

Zou Lei, an illegal immigrant from China, who has been working in various menial jobs in different parts of the country for a couple of years, is arrested by the immigration authorities in New York and imprisoned. She is allowed to see a social worker but not a lawyer. She is not charged with anything and has no idea of what will happen to her.

This chapter describes Zou Lei's life in China before she came to the United States.

She is an Uighur, a nomadic people from northwestern China. Her family is Muslim. Her father is a soldier who dies when Zou Lei is about fifteen. The family moves to a big city, but they are poor. She no longer attends school. They move again, to Shenzhen. Poverty forces her to try her luck in America.

Zou Lei is released from detention and is transported to New York's Port Authority.

Brad Skinner, a veteran of the Iraqi war, arrives in New York, having hitchhiked from Pennsylvania. It is winter. He enters a bar on Broadway, where he drinks too much. Then he wanders around the streets and eats late at night in a McDonald's. He has to leave at four in the morning but finds another McDonald's, where a helpful employee allows him to crash until nine o'clock.

Looking for somewhere to stay, Zou Lei finds an illegal apartment divided into sheds in Queens. Then she looks for a job. She has no working papers but gets a job at a restaurant in a food court in a Chinese immigrant area. Many Central American immigrants live there too, as well as Indians and Pakistanis.

Skinner has bad dreams about the horrifying things he witnessed in Iraq. He lost comrades, including his friend Sconyers. He was severely injured and was evacuated, first to an East Coast military hospital and then to a rehab center in Georgia. Even though he suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, he was sent back to Iraq, where he could not function properly. He had continuing health problems and sank into depression and despair.

Skinner stays at a hostel near the Port Authority, drinking, taking medication, smoking marijuana, and surfing the internet.