You could say that Nell Zink writes archetypally bildungsroman novels, but you wouldn’t be quite right. Her free-spirited protagonists might end up getting what they want, but the plots are sardonic; you can always feel the author winking at you from a window somewhere above. In The Wallcreeper, Zink’s debut novel, Tiffany drops a bombshell about her husband in the opening sentence: “I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock and occasioned the miscarriage.” Fifteen pages later, however, the miscarriage has been forgotten,and we see Tiffany trying to get Stephen to sleep with her sister in their apartment. In Mislaid, a white lesbian college student, Peggy, marries her gay professor and they have two children together. But a couple of chapters in, Peggy runs away with her daughter and outlandishly reinvents herself as a black single mother in Virginia.
Avalon, Zink’s latest novel, is about another misfit: Bran, a “twenty-first-century teenager” in her own words, growing up on an exotic plant nursery in south-western California. Her mother abandoned Bran when she was 10 and became a nun in a Buddhist monastery somewhere in the Sierras. The nursery is managed by Bran’s “common-law stepfather” and his family, the Hendersons, and they run a more or less Dickensian ship. Bran is allowed to stay because she “represented circa eight years of unpaid labour and a potential twenty thousand dollars in earned income tax credits, if the IRS played along”. Bran ends up spending most evenings trimming topiaries at the nursery or preparing an order of ferns for delivery, instead of hanging out with her only friend from school, Jay: “It took me until I was sixteen to figure out that he would never marry me.”
If the opening pages convey the impression that we’re reading a tale of 18th-century drudgery set at the turn of the millennium, the novel pivots into an effervescent meet-cute once Bran is introduced to Peter, a friend of Jay’s from college. Peter is one of those erudite mansplainers bursting irrepressibly with facts garnered from a lifetime of reading. Any moment he might launch into an Arthurian legend, mutter something casually condescending – “Woman artists traditionally shelter behind the mask of genre” – or worse, declare that the screenplay Bran is writing for Jay’s film school assignment is “fascist”. He is also a master at negging: for much of the novel, he claims to have a fiancee, Yasira, who “wants to be a housewife married to a professor like her dad.” This, of course, has the effect of making him seem even more intriguing to Bran: “I could feel that I was being fucked with and liked it a lot.”
Those who’ve read The Wallcreeper will remember a particular intimate moment between Tiffany and Stephen, among the best-written accounts of bad sex in contemporary American fiction. In Avalon, Zink turns out to be a connoisseur at writing about characters who typically fail to get it on. Peter and Bran are both sexually ignorant and once Peter transfers to Harvard, their relationship peters out into a found poem of unanswered texts that Bran sends regularly from her bootlegged phone. (A sample of Peter’s erratic replies: “Don’t miss the oranges (of H. Bosch) ha never read it – not pr0n, only pr0n. Love you.”)
And yet their will-they-won’t-they? dynamic sustains your interest for pages. Bran manages to escape the Hendersons and ends up working in coffee shops and applying for lucrative house-sitting gigs. There is a beautifully done moment where Peter flies to LA one morning to be her knight in shining armour. They book a hotel room together, but only exchange chaste kisses in bed. When they “shift positions”, it is to help Peter finish reading for a class: “My professor is a slave driver.” Bran, too, seems happy catching up with her copy of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a gift from Peter.
Despite the hilarious set pieces, Avalon struck me as the most sincere of Zink’s novels. The slippery sensibility of Mislaid has morphed into a sentimental soft-focus stance. For large stretches, the book seems exclusively about Bran’s quest to get laid. I yearned for something like the disquisitions on birdwatching and ecological collapse in The Wallcreeper; the arguments on fascism and art between Bran and her friends seem no more than annoying distractions.
In an interview 60 years ago, the late French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard asked his older German peer Fritz Lang about the necessity of making films in an increasingly capitalist world. “It has to be done,” Lang replied. “The romantic element.” With Avalon, Zink seems to be suggesting something similar about literary fiction, that perhaps a satirical novelist can occasionally write a slushy story about landing a guy. Every few pages, however, you run into passages that belong to a different, more philosophical, narrative. Glancing up at the California sky one night, Bran wonders about the stars blurring “with inexpressible happiness”: “Why would they do that? Is there any possible ethical justification?” These are questions that can be plausibly asked of Zink’s ambition in this otherwise absorbing novel.
Avalon by Nell Zink is published by Faber (14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
