“Up to the self,” reads the definition of freedom in a Chinese-English dictionary belonging to Atticus Lish’s heroine Zou Lei. “The United States is a freedom country.”
Yet in Preparation for the Next Life, Lish’s tremendous first novel, the towers have already been struck from New York’s skyline, and the ideals of freedom are seemingly dead. The Patriot Act casts a menacing shadow on millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, light and dark skinned, living in the city’s margins. Abandoned by the government and their families, broken soldiers return from war only to seek drugs and snuff films. Lish presents a starkly realistic New York, a city of sweatshops, street markets, prison gangs, and immigrants, way off the end of the 7 train in Queens, where life at best is bleak. Zou Lei’s dictionary is old, and its definitions are outmoded, but she doesn’t know it yet.
