In search of personal paradise
Nell Zink proves again that she's a fearless satirist
Avalon
Nell Zink
Knopf
“There are no stories without paranoia,” one character tells another in Nell Zink's new novel, Avalon. Take murder mysteries. Peter argues that in the real world, suspicious deaths often are ignored. In fiction, however, no killing is ever left unsolved. “The world doesn't cohere on its own,” he says. “It takes paranoia to connect the dots.”
Just as Bran, the novel's teenage narrator, admits to seeing his point — that only the insane can create art — Peter backpedals: “I could be wrong. It's a merciless critique, but it's fictitious to the extent that I'm making it up.”
So goes a typical conversation in Avalon, in which intelligent young people talk at, about and around one another as they attempt to figure out their lives. Bran, Peter and their friends know that capitalism will disappoint them, and that fascism aims to do far worse. Art is their weapon of choice. And because the California-set novel takes place in the first half of the 2010s, their imaginations have yet to be darkened by the threats of Trumpism and COVID-19.
Which is not to say they aren't plenty dark. Here, the transition from adolescence to adulthood is akin to swapping one hair shirt for another.
Bran's father ran off to Australia when she was a baby, and her mother abandoned her for life in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Bran is left to live with her common-law stepfather and his family at their tropical-plant nursery, which also provides home to a biker gang.
Avalon is Zink's sixth book. In a since-deleted tweet, Zink described the novel as “a utopian critique of the crypto-fascist aesthetics of commercial art.”
For sure, it's that. It's also an acid take on friendship, family and young love that, when it isn't squeezing your heart, is doing its best to enrage you.
As she's demonstrated since debuting in 2014 with The Wallcreeper, a novel about American birdwatchers causing trouble in Europe, Zink is a fearless satirist. In her second novel, Mislaid, a lesbian on the run from her marriage to a gay man steals the identity of a dead Black child for her white daughter. For Doxology, from 2019, Zink trained her gaze on punk rock, celebrity worship and post-9/11 politics.
For her part, Bran dismisses herself as an “ignorant child who knew no other life, the perfect employee, taught to accept selfharm as an economic necessity.”
She doesn't entirely believe that. Her thoughts often drift to the mythological site and Arthurian legend that give the novel its title. Is an island paradise waiting out there for her?
Of course not. Still, despite the “preordained lunacy” of her life, Bran believes escape is possible — eventually. Life steams ahead whether a person wants it to or not, and the mystery at work in Avalon is whether Bran is paranoid enough to realize that.