Nell Zink famously writes her books in three-week cycles. Sure, there’s redrafting and revising to do afterwards, but basically once she starts, she just keeps going until she’s finished telling her story.
This explains the particular élan – always dynamic, but never out of control – that has characterised her work since she burst onto the scene in 2014 with her debut, The Wallcreeper. This was a punchy story about Americans in Europe that involved bird watching, eco-terrorism and the breakdown of a marriage. Each page was packed with incident, not a word was included without the utmost consideration. It was very much a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of book.
Ironic then that her follow-up, Mislaid, was a novel all about what you see, and specifically whether it's the same as what you get. Taking as its model the classic Shakespearean mistaken identity plot but set in the American South in the 1960s, and audaciously swopping gender for race, a mother and daughter (obviously white, blonde-haired and blue-eyed) pass themselves off as black.
It might sound absurd, but as the narrator explains: “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people […] The only way to tell white from coloured for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black – ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham – so were you.”
Zink's new novel Nicotine plays with similar confusion. This time round, however, the focus isn't on what people see, but rather on what they hear, or, what they want to hear. Are the stories we tell about ourselves the right ones? Do we have to accept someone else's story as the(ir) truth? In essence: can we change the stories of those around us?
These are some of the conundrums facing Penny, the heroine of the book, an unemployed business graduate who attempts to reclaim her recently deceased father’s childhood home in Jersey City only to discover it’s been taken over by a Community Housing Action (CHA) project, and is now home to a group of (extremely friendly) anarchists, all of whom are addicted to tobacco.
This isn't exactly Occupy Wall Street; the inhabitants of Nicotine (as they've renamed the house) and the other CHA squats in the neighbourhood are rather "ineffectual live and let live pseudo-revolutionaries".
“We’re not in a position to raise money,” says one. “I mean, I give all the support I can to my favourite causes on social media.”
In another writer’s hands, this would be satire, but with Zink, one is never quite sure. It’s easy to describe her fiction as slightly off-kilter but the more of it I read, I’m increasingly convinced that Zink’s entire worldview is slightly different to that of the rest of us. She’s simply telling how it is.
How she sees it, that is, which means images that are always original but nevertheless make immediate and perfect sense.
Take her spot-on description of a group of trans people at a Friday night potluck dinner at another CHA house – “Between the peach fuzz and the push-up bras, it reminds [Penny] of junior high. People seem uneasy and a little too excited about their new and unfamiliar bodies.”
One of Zink’s greatest skills is this ability to dispense with any extraneous detail, honing in instead on the tangible truth of whatever scene, interaction or character she’s describing. When it comes to the latter, for example, behind the larger-than-life cartoonish exteriors lurk real, raw complexities, flaws and weaknesses.
There are two families in this book: the one Penny joins at Nicotine, and the one she’s left behind. The novel begins with the slow, agonising death of her father Norm – a Jewish shamanist who talks a lot about “the cosmic anaconda”. Penny is at his bedside struggling with every stage of the debacle – “No painkillers because they hasten death, and no fluids because they prolong life.”
Again, it would be funny if it weren’t so obviously based on the reality of the Kafkaesque catch-22s of end-of-life hospice care. In the same way that ultimately – after a plot rich in incident, coincidence and more than a touch of mayhem – it’s Penny who’s revealed to be the real anarchist in their midst, so too, her blood relatives are a lot more crazy than the misfits in Nicotine.
Quite simply, Zink writes like no one else and Nicotine is a wild ride of a book you won't want to put down.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London.
