Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

Atticus Lish's New York City is surely the most depressing place on earth, filled with dirt and squalor and violence and the most mean-spirited people imaginable. This is a portrait of the American Nightmare.

On these mean streets two lost souls meet and fall in love -- an illegal immigrant from China and a drugged ex-soldier suffering from PTSD. Never for a moment, though, does the reader imagine that this will be a tale of redemption through love; from the very first an atmosphere of doom hangs over the two. I can't remember when I've read a more depressing love story.

I must admit that Atticus Lish did a very good job of achieving his desired effect. The ultra-violence he portrays is particularly chilling because of the matter-of-fact way it is treated. The many, many conversations are revealing and seem authentic. The many, many details of setting serve to highlight the hopelessness of the environment. I felt dirty as I read, as in actually needing a bath, because of all the descriptions of dirty clothes and bodies, trash-filled rooms and streets.

The writing style also adds to the total effect, being one jerky simple sentence or fragment after another. It actually made me jittery, which speaks to his talent, I guess (presuming he wrote this way purposefully), but also means that I found the book quite unpleasant to read. I also felt that Lish got carried away in creating atmosphere, with page after page after page of descriptions of city streets, naming every store and bit of trash and unsavory smell along the way. I wanted to tell him, "Enough already. I get the picture."

Preparation for the Next Life won the PEN/Faulkner Award this year and was named to several Best of 2014 lists, but that does not mean that most people would enjoy reading it. An author can choose a message and convey it remarkably well and still produce a very distorted and ugly view of life, and I believe that's what Atticus Lish has done.