It’s become impossible to get people’s attention with work that’s not somehow violent and exploitative and dystopian.ĭo you think that’s true of literary fiction? Which they see everywhere, because they are everywhere. In Avalon, there’s danger in the background, and your characters spend a lot of time trying to produce utopian cinema against the grain of a culture that they think encourages violently fascist artistic tendencies. There were all these moments of disastrousness but with happy endings. We ended up like in that classic cartoon scene where you’re drifting down a river, and suddenly you find the water is moving faster and faster and you hear that rushing sound of a waterfall. So many things went wrong in interesting ways, yet we managed not to lose our lives. When Zink and I spoke last week, she had recently returned from a rafting trip on the Oder River. As she slowly liberates herself from life on the farm, she and Peter follow each other around California, talking about utopia and flirting. After her high school friends go off to college and leave Bran laboring in the dust, she meets Peter, an East Coast aesthete and the sort of person for whom “getting a degree was basic hygiene, like washing behind your ears.” Like Zink herself, Peter has seemingly read everything, and his appearance in Bran’s life activates her desire to become a self-taught antifascist screenwriter, and also to get a boyfriend. Her latest novel, Avalon, is narrated by Bran: a Zoomer orphan who’s spent her Cinderella-ish childhood living in the custody of a threatening and reactionary common-law family, the proprietors of a Southern California topiary nursery. She’s written about a group of anarchist squatters navigating real estate and movement strategy in Jersey City (Nicotine ) a white lesbian who, having gone on the lam, successfully passes as Black in the woods of Tidewater, Virginia, where Zink grew up (Mislaid ) and, most recently, a Lower East Side post-punk couple whose daughter stumps for Jill Stein (Doxology ). Her novels tend to be funny, immensely contemporary, and a little chaotic-in their careening prose style as well as in their joyfully unwieldy premises. Nell Zink lives in Brandenburg, Germany, but writes mostly about Americans and their countercultures and excesses.
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