Review by Michael Jones
Ecco Press / August, 2019 / 416 pp
Nell Zink’s literary career has flourished exponentially in the last half-decade. The quick run of her novels published since 2014 has drawn parallels with the autofiction of Ben Lerner, the askew humor of Miranda July, and the far-fetched genre plots of Paul Auster—while developing her own distinctive flair. An American based near Berlin, Zink only began publishing fiction in her fifties. She is joyously bathetic about the genesis of her published novels, only writing the first, The Wallcreeper (2014), she insisted at a recent talk at the London Review Bookshop, to “educate Jonathan Franzen about anal sex.” Nicotine, her mainstream hit from 2016, was born because her agent told her that if they had a novel to sell the week her New Yorker profile came out, she could get a lot of money.
One should take Zink’s throwaway candor with a pinch of salt. Yet a hallmark of her novels is how they burst out of the gate, cracking jokey asides and spinning bouncy tales that ride with speedy lightness over moments of personal crisis before subsiding like the end of a wave, as if the libidinal energy driving the story has wound to a close. Mislaid (2015) recounts the explosive relationship of Peggy and Lee, a gay poet and provocateur and his lesbian student, who accidentally begin a family together. Nicotine features an inflamed, violent love affair between murderous landlord Matt and Jazz, one of his squatters. The novel concludes with Matt’s exhausted concession via text message, “You know I was crazy about you. Literally insane. I might put some serious effort into making it tolerable for you to be around me.”
2019’s Doxology is an outlier in some respects, housed in the stuffier shape of a multigenerational family story set against shocks in contemporary American history. Pam, Daniel, and Joe, three young, broke friends in 1990’s Manhattan, meet to start a post-punk band. While Pam and Daniel get together and have a baby, Joe stumbles into a solo music career that quickly goes mainstream. Part-time babysitter to his friends’ baby daughter Flora, and part-time rock star, Joe overdoses on heroin on September 11th, 2001, left for dead in his girlfriend’s apartment as the Twin Towers burn downtown. The novel’s second half tracks the young adulthood of Flora, who, influenced by memories of her famous babysitter’s democratic friendliness, campaigns for the Green Party during the 2016 Presidential election dominated by Donald Trump.
Doxology’s remit at the level of plot is significantly larger than that of Zink’s other novels, and might conventionally demand a more stately pace. Yet while Doxology’s frame feels more carefully arranged than those of its predecessors, its narration is still helter-skelter. There remains very little time for trauma in Zink’s characterizations. When Pam, who ran away from home at seventeen, contacts her parents to tell her they have a five-year-old granddaughter, they drive straight to New York; Ginger, Pam’s mother, jumps out of the car into Pam’s arms. “Are you guys healthy?” Pam asks. “Are things okay?” “Except for that untraceable daughter bit that broke my heart into little pieces, it’s been a fairly smooth journey.” Mother and daughter narrate the emotional work of a decade to each other while standing on the sidewalk, a giddily paced exchange that captures the moment’s painful absurdity while simultaneously shutting off conventional realism, wrapping up abruptly so the story can plunge forward. Such surreal buoyancy feels at odds with the slow time of trauma narrative, and it follows that Zink’s depiction of 9/11—despite featuring heavily in promotions and blurbs for Doxology—is relatively minor. Whereas a novel like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man inhabits the stretched moment of the hijacked planes’ impacts (downtown Manhattan “not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night”) Doxology prefers suggestive side-glimpses. The morning of the attacks, Pam and Daniel “could see that something was wrong. They could almost see how wrong it was.” The characters’ “almost-seeing” reveals a “dark cloud,” the flat, monosyllabic prose here as close to sincerity as the novel gets.
September 11th’s key function in Doxology is to serve as a “straight” counterpoint for Joe’s death. Joe is a fictive conduit for Zink’s irreverent positivity. We meet him as an undiagnosed “case of high-functioning Williams syndrome,” displaying the typical “gregarious extroversion, storytelling habit, heart defect and musical gift.” An ebullient innocent, he “rhapsodizes about fries and soda” while waiting tables; to teach an infant Flora not to “rub her nub” in public he invents a rhyme for her to sing, “Got to rub my nub in the club.” This tune becomes his first hit single. Daniel describes Joe as “surfing the randomosity…It’s my name for what separates us from machines. The lack of intelligent design. The way we get dropped into the world.” Gwen, Joe’s “it girl” partner, claims he committed suicide on 9/11; seeing “all that destruction and death, he simply couldn’t face it.” Yet Joe’s randomosity eschews the hypersensitive artist stereotype. His mythical generosity operates alongside a puppyish short attention span and unabashed pursuit of pleasure. He is appallingly dismissive of well-meaning fangirl Eloise, retorting, “I wouldn’t fuck her for practice,” and he likes “everything about [groupies], even the way condoms slowed them down.” When an adult Flora insists on the meaningfulness of Joe’s death—“he was heartbroken!”—Pam retorts, “Was Joe ever even sad? He didn’t have an altruistic bone in his body.” Joe is likeable without being moral. On September 11th it is actually Gwen who wants heroin to “combat the stress” of the day; Joe is worried it will “spoil my appetite for pizza.”
Doxology labors in the absurd gap between the national solemnity of September 11th and the randomized personal world of Joe’s death. As with her headily surreal reunion of Ginger and Pam, Zink’s ironic overturning of Joe’s alleged suicide casts a breezy eye over the self’s interiority. The self is not, she insists, a serious space. Her matter-of-fact externalization of characters’ motives bears comparison with Sally Rooney’s tell-not-show approach in Normal People (2018): “She told him that it was nice and he just said nothing. She felt she would do anything to make him like her.” However, while the slow, morose maturation of the intertwined protagonists in Rooney’s novel buys unquestioningly into a Freudian composition of character rooted in trauma, Zink’s livelier writing is skeptical of repressed motivation. In the weeks after Joe’s death, Daniel is engulfed by “ambient pain,” hating the girl who inadvertently killed his friend: “Because his fantasies were violent, he saw himself as suppressing white-hot rage. He wasn’t suppressing anything. Grief and anger were what he had.” Through such demystifications of fantasy, Zink lightens the load of subjectivity.
The goal is Joe’s randomosity, a live attentiveness formulated in Nicotine as an escape from story altogether: “It’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems,” Penny, the novel’s protagonist, learns. “If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.” Penny experiences this clarity when she sleeps with her major crush, Rob, whose previous “story” was that he was impotent. The couple rapturously discover that “we had to take our clothes off to even communicate.” Sex is the easiest paradigm for connection in Nicotine, and Joe’s innocence flows unpolluted through his adventures with rock groupies in Doxology, because at its clearest, Zink’s version of character is all about wanting—about the worldliness of desire itself. She has less in common with the novel tradition than with the Objectivist poets prominent in the 1930s, who saw us not as psychological or historical subjects, but object-like entities “dropped” or “flung” into existence, naively and miraculously here. “We want to be here,” George Oppen insisted in his poem “World, World,” and it is what that “here” means, how the world acts on us to give us our desire to hang around, that in the Objectivists’ view deserves interrogation. “The self is no mystery,” “World, World” asserts, “the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on.”
Zink’s breezy disposition towards mysteries of the self produces fictions nimble at constellating unorthodox, affectionate social fabrics. In Mislaid, a decadent white aristocratic father and son reunited with a black-passing mother and daughter living in poverty in ’70’s Virginia; in Doxology, the New York post-punk scene of the ’90s and the volunteer sectors of ecology and left-wing party-political campaigning propped up by millennials in the ’10s. A levity about story and past when constructing these worlds creates a comedic yet democratic empathy. Even Gwen, the girlfriend who causes Joe’s death, is made sympathetic through expressions of humor:
Gwen wasn't a victim of childhood trauma. She had tried drugs because she was an uninhibited, fun-loving person, and she was addicted because that’s what drugs will do. She submitted to lesser traumata of all kinds to get them, because she feared the greater trauma of doing without. She was a trauma avoider, not a trauma reenactor…Selflessly she put the needs of drugs and men before her own, subordinating herself, as though they had picked her up after the modeling agency dropped her.
The threading of Gwen’s inner workings here, speedily summative as ever, is a generous take on a character who could easily have just been a villain. Zink’s novels take care of everybody; they cosset all the players in her imagined communities.
A tonal lightness is the source of the expanded reach of Zink’s largest novel to date. Lightness is the engine for Doxology’s skating across generations of characters, for its unique, absurdly buoyant engagement with 21st century American history. This buoyancy has been accused of political nihilism. Madeleine Schwartz argues in her review for the New Yorker that Doxology’s “reader isn’t sure whether [the novel’s] portraits count as realism or satire,” and this uncertainty over whether its characters’ problems even matter generates a “skepticism about what, precisely, a novelist—or an activist or any individual—can accomplish.” Doxology’s characters exist among political realities that statically happen: September 11th, Trump. Schwartz sees Zink’s levity towards her characters as pyrrhic satire born of resignation, an “eye roll rather than a weapon.”
Yet I would argue that, overall, the novel brandishes both its levity and its empathy with an abundant narrative energy that, far from an eye roll, is a weapon in its own right. In E.L. Doctorow’s Andrew’s Brain (2014), another recent American novel that uses September 11th as a touchstone, a civil servant in George W. Bush’s White House waxes dangerous about the pastoral bastardizing of his hero Mark Twain, whose “intemperate ghost [would] rise from his folksy childhood and rage at the imperial monster he has helped create.” Doctorow gestures unmistakably to Huck Finn’s swamps, which have become the idealized heartland of the isolationist “America First” doctrine. “You are only the worst so far,” Andrew portentously rebukes Bush. “You have shown us the path into the Dark Wood.” Andrew nevertheless insists that Twain’s intention “always, always, was to wrap himself in society” and “write of his neighbors with amused compassion.” The description feels apt for Zink’s novels as well. In wrapping herself in society and democratically drawing askew communities inflected with the burdens of the Bush and Trump presidencies, Zink might be betrayed by the shades of her wrappings, by a poverty of spirit and collective will, but this is no reason not to do it. Her poking fun is pyrrhic, yes. Yet the sheer unfazed vitality of her style and the resonant empathy of her imagined collectives are emboldening. Amid a dark political present, Doxology is Zink’s shoulder-shaking reminder that being alive is fun.
Michael Jones is a writer and private tutor based in London. He has previously published in 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (Cassell) and Textual Practice (Routledge).