There haven’t been any Bro posts in a while. Time has passed. I’ve missed a few lit events and some new books have made debuts. Sorry about that. But I have been reading, count on it. So let’s get back into things.
I’ve never been up on new music. That’s not to say I don’t like bands that just came out and I only sit in my room while dusty vinyl spins, though that is close to true, but I am usually the guy that catches a band about two years after they break. Have you guys heard In Utero? It’s better than I expected.
With literature things are a little different. I haven’t meant for them to be but I do try to keep up on what’s new. When I heard about Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, and damn it if I remember where or how, I was ready. I knew the November 11 release date about a month out. I worked my library queue to make sure only a few new requests would be coming in at the same time. I rushed through the last book I had in hand the week before. Then, on a Sunday, I checked out the schedule at KGB Bar and found out the author, Atticus Lish, was reading from his book that night. Maybe I could get an advanced copy of the book, I could even meet the guy, damn was I on top of things.
You may be able to pick up on my recent lean toward stories from the War in the Middle East. I don’t see this stopping any time soon, though I probably should lay off the gas a bit. Theme burn out is a real thing that I regularly run straight into. I missed the National Book awards this week because I was out of town for work but Redeployment, a book of short stories based around the War, won for Fiction. So the streak is likely to continue. I don’t know if I think short stories should win for fiction, maybe they should have their own category and frankly I don’t prefer the format but regardless, I’m likely to pick the book up soon.
So, Atticus Lish. I checked my fantasy football scores one last time (sup, BRO) and dimmed my phone as he stepped to the podium. He read a brief scene from his book in which the romantic protagonists meet. Yes, it’s a love story. The male main character is a traumatized Iraq Vet floundering in New York City. The female half is an illegal Chinese immigrant. This idea is as modern as I can imagine. This is even before Siamese Dream. I am the guy who found Gish. I’ve begun to believe my second reason for seeking new fiction is to find works that reflect how things really are today, that are about either what isn’t on the news yet or is behind whatever is condensed as news. The first, well that’s the perfect story, and we will keep on talking about that forever. But, a torn up Veteran and an illegal immigrant girl falling in love is about a dozen years too current for television. I grabbed my just ten dollar copy of the yet to be released book, shook hands with the author, suggested he pick up Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and left as pumped as when I came in.
You kind of know Preparation for the Next Life isn’t going to end well. No plot reveal there. Romeo and Juliet it is not and I don’t have a ton of experience with romantic plots but everything in the story is set to collide. Skinner, the soldier, is shaken to his core and descending fast, Zou-lei is illegal, barely employed and waiting for Homeland Security to catch her, and a villain steps in about halfway through whose actions are stomach souring. I just hung on and hoped for some great scenes before the inevitable explosion or collapse at the end.
Memorable scenes did arrive. Others dragged on a little. There seemed to be two authors at work on the pages. The New York described in the book is one most transplants, legal, middle and upper class ones anyway, have never seen. Lish paints these with authority but sometimes for too long. In the other direction, some chapters end abruptly. Where other authors may try to pause on a poetic note, which is dangerous and when it fails it crashes hard, Lish does something else. You get the feeling he was on the same streets the characters were, working his own thoughts through, and packaged them in the story of Skinner and Zou-lei. And since he was still working through them, they are left incomplete.
There is enough dread to keep the story moving even when sections end on characters staring at the horizon. The characters push the reader as well. I started out seeing Skinner as a tall, tough as nails crew cut with a monologue but this was wrong. Nor was Zou-lei a petite, innocent fetish. Their physicality was something I had to make myself accept, dropping my own archetypes, and when I did the realness of the story came through.
Once the bad guy showed how wretched he could really be, I didn’t want to go on. I was scared to get to the end of the book. I had to get myself in the right mood each time I started reading. Eventually I made it through. The worst was on the way and it came, and then again it didn’t. The story ended both better and worse than I guessed. There’s your teaser right there.
Now the hard part. How do I criticize a guy I met and shook hands with? Who was extremely gracious and friendly and signed my copy of his own work thanking me for reading? Didn’t I say the Bro was going to be all positive? And how do I stick to my life long motto of never mess with a guy with cauliflower ear? I don’t know. But I have to be fair and write what I think so here it goes. This was Lish’s first novel and you can tell. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are many parts that seem disjointed, there are rough edges, but every piece is written with honesty and emotion. The man means what he writes, even if there is some meandering. He never poses. There are no advertised philosophies. As a kid I read about how the Velvet Underground were imperfect and admired for it and this was how they inspired an endless number of bands in every decade after them. They made you believe you could make music too. I don’t know, they always seemed flawless to me. With Lish, accepting the fractures in his prose could add to his appeal. For me it was a little distracting.
I got to see the author read from his book in a dark attic of an NYC bar. I finally caught something at its early, awkward start. I’m in on the secret. But lets forget my CD collection. The story is what matters. Lish puts the lives of the characters above his words and for that, Preparation is a win. He wrote about terror and love without bullshitting. Maybe truth doesn’t have time to put you in a good mood. He was fair and hopefully I was too.
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