Atticus Lish's "Preparations for the Next Life" winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award ('15) for Fiction

"Preparations for the Next Life" is titled from a bi-lingual sign (English/Arabic) that hangs above a mosque in Queens.  The lives of an illegal Chinese/Muslim immigrant woman, Zou Lei and a mentally ill Iraqi vet, Brad Skinner, come together in a volatile love story.  Both their broken, stressful worlds of an undocumented immigrant & a psychotic Iraqi vet with PTSD collide on a destructive pathway that is a depthless, black void.  Skinner never felt obligated to anyone who hadn't shared his war.  Zou Lei orphaned since childhood made an onerous migration to the US doing whatever necessary for self-preservation.  Atticus Lish's writing takes us through an unsurmountable tour of duty where instinct & hunger are primal. Life is so brutal for Lei she's forced into hard labor & do many things she would never want in order to survive.  She never felt what it means to be safe or loved.  Upon discharge, Skinner was prescribed medication for his anxiety, psychosis and inability to sleep and left to his own resources.  He has no civilian skills and is fearful of making only disasterous decisions.  He's right in accessing his inability to cope.  Unlike the gun he keeps, his mind has no safety to shut off all his deranged thinking.  Having crossed paths with their own needs, their tribal army of 2 seems the better alternative than being alone.  Their union fails to heal one another.   A greater desert forms between them than either had known from combat or country of origin.  The unbridled abuse & torments for both open a vortex into an underworld that most of us would never see or choose to know.  For both Skinner & Lei life holds no guarantees except unrelenting anguish and abuse.  The promise of a obtaining what is wanted in the next life offers a tempting reassurance of reward for doing everything correct.  Atticus Lish (b Amer '72) is a vet & has worked the uneviable odd jobs of many undocumented workers.  Lish's taut writing enables the reader to feel Skinner's confusion & anger and Lei's vulnerabilities & resilience.  There are other broken characters who know only to inflict pain in this oppressive & effecting novel.   "Preparations for the Next Life" paints a Hellish world that is all too real.