Welcome to America in the 21st century; more specifically, to the community of Flushing, Queens, near the eastern border of New York City. In Flushing, three lives intersect.
Zou Lei is a young illegal immigrant from western China; she is half Han Chinese and half Muslim Uighur. We don’t know the full details of her journey, but she has crossed over from Mexico and made her way to the I-95 corridor, where she will work 15-hour days in motels and restaurants for way less than minimum wage, living in flops provided by her employers and traveling to and from work in vans. Early in the book Zou Lei is arrested in an immigration sweep and spends several months in jail before she is, by some whim of fate, released. Zou Lei is the dust beneath your feet, the lowest of the low, a slave for whom no master is responsible, working as hard as she possibly can just to stay alive. But by any measure she is the most fortunate, healthy, and successful of the book’s three major characters.
Brad Skinner has just returned from three tours of duty in Iraq, where he has just barely managed to avoid being blown up on multiple occasions; his only close friend has not been so lucky. He has seen and done things that trouble him greatly. He has no friends, no place to go, and his most significant possessions are a loaded pistol and a duffel bag full of prescription medications. Skinner (as he is called) can barely negotiate the purchase of a meal, let alone a job. He has a few thousand dollars left from his army pay. Is there any way for such a person to survive?
In the early part of the book we watch Zou Lei and Skinner alternately, careening through the international bazaar that Flushing has become. I recognized all the street names because I grew up in Flushing 50 years ago. Back then it was a lower-middle class neighborhood of Italian, Irish, and Jewish families. Today it is the crossroads of the earth, the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. I would no more feel at home in the Flushing of today than Ben Franklin would in the Philadelphia of today.
When Zou Lei and Skinner connect, they feel a joy that neither they, nor we, could have expected.
They were surrounded in neon and headlights, striding through the darkness, going in and out of darkness and light among the Chinese signs and lights, Skinner almost shouting. Asians went around them. Zou Lei was marching with her arms crossed across her chest and her hair blowing around her face and she was laughing.
It’s funny story!
I’m like, no, dude!
This animal.
I’m like, do not do it! I’m like, think again!
Their combined momentum moved people out of the way. Or people didn’t move and Zou Lei and Skinner went around them and rejoined on the other side, Skinner saying:
I’m like, take a breath!
— continuing to talk through the silhouettes of people like paper targets who got between them.
I like it when Zou Lei says "This animal"; I'm not sure exactly what she means, but clearly she shares Skinner's exhilaration and is doing her best to adopt his tone. Will they be able to maintain this connection? The odds are steep. Skinner is like an abused animal; his mind is locked in the past and he is barely aware of his circumstances. He can’t really function--it’s a miracle that he has been able to make this human connection.
It’s only on rare occasions that Skinner can rouse himself to even be aware of Zou Lei's presence, usually after she has jolted him back to the present by provoking him in some way. They talk of marrying. But then the third major character makes his presence felt—Jimmy, the son of Skinner’s landlord, who returns from prison. Jimmy’s not a wholesome guy, and as his path skirts and crosses those of the other two, we know where the story is headed just as we know what will happen in that scene from The Birds where the man is standing next to his car at the gas station, lighting his cigarette, and getting ready to drop his match as a puddle of gas grows around his feet.
So there you have a plot summary of sorts. It’s a powerful story, and I think it gives us a true and not very encouraging picture of what “disadvantaged in America” is like. But Preparation for the Next Life has a lot more going for it besides this grimly realistic depiction, and that is the commitment, power, and intensity of the writing. To start with, there is a kind of furious intensity evident in the book’s every sentence. Lish’s Flushing is as specific and detailed as Joyce’s Dublin:
The man who gave her the DVDs took care to avoid arrest. He would not give her his name, so she couldn’t rat him out if she got caught. All she knew about him was that he was from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province and people from Wenzhou knew how to survive. On the phone, he would say to meet him in the doorway and she would go to the place he meant. He would drive up in an Expedition, his ball cap on sideways, and give her the goods. He looked like a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime — all dark clothes, down vest, fingerless gloves, smoking Mild Seven cigarettes. His face was lopsided, the result of ingesting pesticide as a child, which gave him the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.
Not just a manager from a Chinese factory—a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime. We get the make of the car, the brand of the cigarettes. We even learn about an incident from this man’s childhood. This man who is merely walking through the book for a single paragraph.
There are scenes, incidents, and itineraries that we just know must have been recorded by the author as he walked the streets of Flushing, because no one could ever just sit at a desk and imagine the world in such documentary detail. We get an inventory of the streets and the people who occupy them. I can open this book to just about any page and find a passage like this one:
After she had showered, dressed, and brushed her wet hair, he took her to Fratelli's for pizza. While they ate, he reached across the orange table, trying to reach for something of hers. It felt like a particularly dark night. He settled for her elbow. She was using both hands to hold up the triangular pizza slice, which kept buckling in the middle, like a corpse being carried to a helicopter. He held her elbow, watched her chest move as she performed the functions of life - breathing, eating.
It's just the pills.
I know. You are a young strong man.
Today everything was weird.
The sweet sharp pain that foreshadows weeping visited him again in the throat and eyes. He put his head down, glanced sideways at his reflection in the vertical mirrored strips that covered the wall of the pizza parlor. His eyes looked like someone had sprayed roach spray in them, an allergic response. He thought of chafed, reddened mucous membranes after the friction of sex.
Pizza buckling like a corpse being carried to a helicopter.
The book is relentless throughout, but towards the end almost every chapter seems like an epic in minature that I would read in a state of rapt agitation. In one, Zou Lei, having escaped from a rape attempt and unable to find Skinner, takes the subway to somewhere in south Queens and then starts walking. She has escaped without her shoes so she begs a pair of flip flops from a merchant. She walks into the evening and then into the night. We see everything that she sees, including street names and landmarks, so I could follow her on a map, up through St Albans and Jamaica all the way to Great Neck, which is where she is when the sun comes up. Fifteen hours, thirty miles. The flips flops disintegrate along the way. Why is she walking? Because she has physical energy, but nowhere to go.
I remember a couple of ill-advised hitchhiking trips from my youth, and the notion of being alone on a road at four in the morning resonates with me. But Lish is as indefatigable as his character and the scene unspools before our eyes:
For some time thereafter, she walked in a state of half-awakeness past things she half-perceived. Francis Lewis Boulevard. The Belle Aire playground. A black woman thin as an African with dyed blond hair prowling on a traffic island. A sprinkler was whisking in the grass. The public restroom door was open and you could see the sink and stall. Two cars drove by booming rap. She passed the on-ramp for the Grand Central Parkway. She passed the Satya Sanatan Dharma Mandir, a place of worship. A spiked iron fence. The Creedmoor Psychiatric Facility — the buildings set at random angles, an iron gate left open. She could see weeds in the asphalt like rice paddy squares. It looked abandoned. Ambulances parked in a fleet. A section of the fence hit by a car. Beneath the mercury lights, she saw a shadow that didn’t belong to her and looked around to see who was following her, but there was no one there.
I don’t read enough current fiction to know if this book is as exceptional as it seemed to me. I’ve refrained from looking at published reviews until I could finish this post—the exception was the New York Review of Books review, by Cathleen Schine, from which I learned about the existence of Preparation for the Next Life. Looking back at that review now, I see that I have adopted its tone:
The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman. 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.
So, that’s two votes in favor.
