Pity the Poor Immigrant: Preparation for the Next Life

Tensions building in Atticus Lish's Preparation for the Next Life, as the strangely matched couple at the heart of this novel, Chinese (illegal) immigrant Zou Lei and PTSD-troubled Iraq War vet Brad Skinner talk about getting married. More than any other section of the book, this part becomes political-polemical, as we see the enormous obstacles the poor immigrant faces at every step: her pecuniary boss at the Asian restaurant continues to cheat on her pay check, knowing she has no recourse and cannot fight him or challenge him in any way. She seeks how marriage to Skinner could perhaps solve her green-card problem, granting her immediate citizenship, maybe - but she's caught in a bureaucratic whirlwind of Kafkaesque dimensions - but this seems very real and accurate, not surreal and expressionist. She tries to get legal advice - of course has little idea where to turn and no idea how to afford the costs of a lawyer - but does learn that she will need some kind of legal identity dox just to get married - and applying for these could put her immigration status in jeopardy - she may have to return to China and apply from there - but how to afford that? And at what risk? The stars are against them - and meanwhile Skinner is sinking deeper into his drug-addled depression, and the ex-con son of his landlord seems to be conspiring to kick him out of his basement apartment - just one more misery in the endless strand of misery he faces. Writing continues to be extraordinary throughout, including a long tour-de-force chapter in which three tough street guys drink heavily and talk about street fights and revenge and generally bang each other up - the kind of passage that, yes, could have been cut, just peripheral and ornamental to the plot, but make up the whole tone and world view of this novel, which is a vision of a usually inaccessible and overlooked world and culture rather than a conventional love story or domestic tragedy: the plot itself is peripheral in this novel.