An Iraq veteran with PTSD and traumatic head injury. An undocumented Muslim immigrant traumatized by indefinite detention after 9/11. A felon who went into prison slightly bent and came out 10 years later purely evil. Author Atticus Lish throws these three characters together before the chaotic backdrop of New York City street life in a novel that is not so much a thriller as a slow-moving train wreck: You know what’s going to happen; you know there’s going to be lots of damage. The only question is how and whether anyone will survive.
Brad Skinner is the vet. He joined the Army out of high school to get out of his small Pennsylvania town. He was stop-lossed into involuntary service for three tours of duty in Iraq, in spite of a head injury that gives him headaches and slows down his thinking. He’s been discharged with $10,000 in his bank account and comes to New York “holding to the idea that if he partied hard enough, he’d eventually succeed in having a good time and would start wanting to live again.” He carries a small pistol in his combat pack; the awareness of that pistol is ever-present, an indication that it’s likely to be used before the final scene.
Zou Lei is the Chinese Muslim, a Uighur from the northwest of that country. As a child she was relocated to eastern China, along with her mother, who gradually went crazy there. Zou Lei found her way to Mexico, where she crossed the border into the U.S. She was caught up in an immigrant sweep after 9/11 and inexplicably released three months later. She’s gone to New York to hide, thinking it’ll be hard to find her there. She works in a down-scale Chinese restaurant and is discriminated against by other Chinese because she’s not “true” Chinese.
Skinner and Zou Lei meet on the streets and fall in love. He wants a girlfriend; she needs an ally. They form an unlikely connection over a shared interest in lifting weights and running. But Skinner is on his way down, suffering for days at a time with depression, increasingly drinking and self-medicating. Zou Lei is a survivor: She’s looking for better work and longer hours, and she’s trying to figure out how to stabilize her immigration status. She’s smart. When Skinner tells her he’ll marry her to keep her from being deported, she knows that getting married under the fake name on her ID won’t help much.
Woven in and around this fairly thin plot are List’s beautifully detailed, chaotic descriptions of New York City street life and immigrant workplaces. He captures quite well the difficulty of understanding exactly what’s going on as the two walk or run through the neighborhoods or as Zou Lei looks for work. He evokes dialogue, sounds and signs with impressive immediacy: “Men in white socks and waiters’ pants stood all around talking on their phones, discussing monthly salaries. A man shouted into his cell phone, Two thousand four hundred. But the cook is dishonest. A sign said No Spitting On Floor. You received a free map of Fuzhou down to the sea. A job introduction cost thirty-five dollars. … You could also get a social security card without a birth certificate. It said this right on the wall in Chinese next to the minimum wage law printed in English.”
This fairly long novel bears a clear imprint of being influenced by graphic novels: Larger-than-life characters, more archetype than stereotype, with little interior life; a dark, noir-like ambiance, where friends are few and far between and strangers are at best indifferent and likely dangerous; and a vibrant backdrop. Extended verbal descriptions replace the graphic art, turning a bit tedious as the plot tension rises. Like a graphic novel, the book’s main characters — the third being Jimmy Turner, the released felon and Skinner’s landlady’s son — seem to move on their own once dropped into the narrative, with little likelihood of learning or changing because of their experiences.
Jimmy regards Skinner as a wimp and Zou Lei as a prostitute. He sets a collision course with Skinner, “testing” him with micro-aggressions like stealing from his refrigerator,
rearranging his things and playing verbal games when he meets him on the street. We learn Jimmy’s capacity for evil when he brutally beats and rapes a Chinese masseuse. After a long, slow buildup, the inevitable arrives. As might happen in a graphic novel, one character improbably escapes – and if you’re familiar with the genre, you can guess who that might be.
List belies the darkness of his story in an upbeat epilogue that implies that post-9/11 America doesn’t have to be this way: That there are pockets of kindness left out in the hinterlands. But this implication is overwhelmed by the darkness of the story and the feeling that for this country, like Skinner, there’s no direction left but down; any redemption would have to come from outside.