Atticus Lish’s route to success is one of the more remarkable publishing stories of recent years. Having spent five years writing his debut novel, the former marine and mixed martial-arts fighter promptly sold it for $2,000 to the obscure, one-man publishing outfit Tyrant Press; within weeks of its publication in the US last November, however, The New York Times was calling it “perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade” and this spring it was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Fortunately, the novel is more than just a publishing sensation: 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.
The book opens with Zou Lei, a member of the Muslim Uighur minority from Northwestern China, entering America illegally and making her way, via a brief spell in jail (where the Patriot Act, not for the first time in the novel, raises its threatening head) to New York’s Chinatown district “where everybody was illegal just like her”. Here, she plans to “get lost in the crowd and keep her head down. Forget living like an American. It was enough to be free and on the street.”
The other half of the love-story equation, Brad Skinner, has just returned from a tour of Iraq. He is a 21st-century version of Hemingway’s war-damaged protagonists, trying to quieten his mind with physical exertion and alcohol, and arrives in New York in the belief that “if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again”. On good days, he works out; on bad days, he drinks and watches beheadings on his laptop, slipping into a PTSD-fog he is wholly untrained to deal with.
The two misfits meet and forge an unlikely relationship – powerfully and unsentimentally rendered – based on their shared outsider status. Skinner soon finds himself in an Irish-American corner of Queens, renting a basement room from the disturbingly dysfunctional Murphy family. The key player here, we soon come to understand, is the son Jimmy, an extravagantly malignant ex-con who takes part in one scene of brutality so unflinching it might make even Cormac McCarthy wince.
The equations underlying the narrative are simple: two men, both with a history of violence, and one woman, the moral centre of the novel. References to the symbolic landscape of Zou Lei’s upbringing as well as descriptions of Jimmy’s animalistic appearance make it clear that the structure of the novel is almost childishly simple, requiring two lovers to run towards the mountains before the wolf overtakes them. 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.
Lish devotes sustained attention to the lives of the underclass, and the novel vividly renders the many forms that desperation can take: the longing for a new pair of shoes, the urgent need for any kind of job, the forlorn hunt for an ID card. Despite the religious title (taken from an inscription on the wall of a mosque that Zou Lei visits) it soon becomes clear that the novel’s focus is on those who have been poorly prepared for this life, either by being born in the wrong country, growing up in the wrong family, or sent to the wrong war.
Notable influences here, perhaps, are the street-level perspectives in some of Don DeLillo’s cityscapes along with the psychedelic intensity of Dennis Johnson’s Angels (another dark, unsparing story of star-crossed lovers). These narrative models are strongly masculine ones and yet part of what makes Lish’s novel work is the creation of a vividly-drawn, offbeat female heroine: Zou Lei is pragmatic, loyal and formidable (as we see in one powerful, extended scene towards the end of the book) and she, like Skinner, becomes far more than the stock character she could have been.
Lish has enviable literary genes: his father is Gordon Lish, the editor responsible for carving the stories of Raymond Carver (and those of many other writers) into slimmer shapes as well as being an influential teacher and writer in his own right. Father and son diverge notably in their approach, however. Lish Snr’s fictions are avant-garde in their approach (his new book Cess, due out next month from New York-based OR Books, consists partly of a lengthy list of arcane words) and tend to forge a deliberately claustrophobic mood as they trap the reader inside spiralling, disorienting monologues. Atticus Lish’s writing, by contrast, continually looks outwards: Preparation is a novel of social realism (written, by all accounts, without any parental input) that compulsively records the sensory impressions and social interactions of everyday life.
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:
“You could take a wrong turn on Franklin, by the next lane over, by that courtyard with the cats in it, the trees with cancer, the ones that looked boiled, melted, cooled-off and hardened like that. The kind of high gates you see at a tow truck lot...Each unit had a steel door painted the color of Crest toothpaste. It said Nutty in spraypaint. On the chest-high foundations, Wreck, Remy, Slugz ’92. The graffiti was faded. Asians lived in the low rises, but it said Murder in fresh paint and where did the alley go? You could climb into the windows, which were low on the first floor and unguarded, but you wouldn’t want to.”
The narrative ear is even more impressively employed as we find ourselves eavesdropping on, for example, the harried, multilingual conversation of workers in a Chinatown fast-food kitchen and the freewheeling, manic chatter of crack addicts on a street corner. This is a narrative full of movement, with characters constantly walking, running and exercising, and much of the action takes place in the frenetic and alienating public spaces of the city – fast-food restaurants, gas stations, gyms, parks. 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.
