Zink’s novels are so strange that it is hard to understand why anybody actually like them. Gene Glover for The New Republic

“I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices?” Thus wonders the narrator of The Wallcreeper, Nell Zink’s 2014 debut. “Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana—not that three isn’t enough, but that the three on offer aren’t enough to sustain a marriage?” This is how all of Zink’s jokes go. She starts off nasty and allusive, confusing you with bits of history you don’t know, then curdles the thought into something between an aphorism and a punchline. Laugh, cry, put the book down—see if she cares.



We haven’t had very long to get to grips with Nell Zink. Born in 1964 in California and raised in rural Virginia (she always includes the “rural” in professional bios), Zink became famous with her acidic debut only two years ago. Magazine profiles invariably emphasize that she’d published practically nothing before striking up an epistolary friendship with the novelist Jonathan Franzen in middle age. After Zink contacted Franzen about endangered birds in 2011, she published two novels in rapid succession. First came The Wallcreeper, then Mislaid in 2015, then a whole slew of reviews explaining Zink’s charming rags-to-riches tale, while praising her freakish novels in vague terms. The Guardian said that Zink “succeeds in putting into words the most inexpressible experiences,” which is not very specific.

This version of Zink’s story is troubling but convenient. It posits Franzen as a heroic excavator of talent, fishing Zink out of obscurity like a bog person out of the peat. At the same time, it doesn’t tell us much about Zink herself or the deeper origins of her books. Reading Franzen doesn’t particularly help us read Zink: Even though some of their concerns are similar—they are both vicious on the subject of middle-class hypocrisy—there are few obvious similarities between Franzen’s universalizing social novels and Zink’s short, frantic fictions. The critics have been a little too ready to hitch a female writer’s star to a completely different male wagon, no doubt because a lot of them are mildly sexist.

On the other hand, the discovered-by-Franzen narrative has at least the virtue of coherence. We use Franzen as a way to understand a career that otherwise makes no sense at all: Zink’s novels, while undeniably excellent, are so strange that it is hard to understand why anybody actually likes them. Zink satirizes average-to-privileged people in the manner of Jane Austen, but her books are too short to run to social commentary. She’s also wildly erudite, but straightforward, even plainspoken, in her vocabulary. American publishing today milks a reliably profitable herd of authors for bland, high-fat novels. Zink’s work is distinctly unpasteurized, and yet—here she is.

Zink’s two new books emphasize her contradictions, and offer some clues to her appeal. Nicotine, a novel, and Private Novelist, which is harder to categorize, represent the two sides of Zink’s bizarro stylistic coin. The first is propulsive and plot-driven, adventurous and populist; the second digressive and experimental, written for a highly educated audience of one. Nicotine is most like Zink’s more traditional second novel, Mislaid, while Private Novelist takes after her difficult debut, The Wallcreeper. In one, she wants us to think with the heart, in the other with the head. Love and care for one another, she seems to say, but know that you do it against the backdrop of decayed and overloaded and nonsensical cultural wreckage, in a world that mostly is meaningless.