“Preparation”: An Astounding Novel?
Cathleen Schine lavishes such praise that I can’t help but feel we readers are being set up for disappointment: ‘”Preparation for the Next Life,” by Atticus Lish (pictured), is an astounding first novel about a world so large there is, sometimes, nowhere to go; a world so small the people in it, sometimes, get lost. The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman. It is a love story, a war story, a tale of New York City in which familiar streets become exotic, mysterious, portentous, foul, magnificent. Some of it reads like poetry. All of it moves with a breathless momentum.’
