Gen X novel of the year and beyond
Through the end of the year, the Chicago Tribune is revisiting books worthy of further recognition.
Has Nell Zink written the Great American Gen X Novel?
Gen X is a mere wedge of a generation, sandwiched between the bigger, louder Boomers and Millennials. We’re often confined to small spaces on the cultural margin, but Zink’s very Gen X novel “Doxology” comes out swinging for a center spot in the literary canon.
Published in August — it’s OK, we’re used to being overlooked — it’s one of the most notable novels of the year.
The story begins in the late 1980s in New York City, with our three heroes, Pam, Joe and Daniel, entering something like adulthood.
Pam has escaped Washington, D.C. — a comfortable suburb, actually, where her punk rock devotion clashed with her parents’ notion that she shouldn’t steal from them for bus fare. With more brains than sense, Pam opts for Manhattan, rather than her own senior year of high school, and lands a gig at a small computer firm. She picks up coding easily, but what she really cares about is playing in a band.
That connects her to Daniel. He too is from another world — a conservative Christian family in Wisconsin. He’s a college graduate with a broad grasp of humanities and a love of making music.
He comes to New York without any real plans, takes a job with a temp agency and rents a place above a video store in Chinatown. The loft is barely habitable, but even so Pam soon moves in. It’s partly because she hates her exslash-roommate so much, but also because she and Daniel make a really good match. They have excellent sarcastic banter.
The third in their trio — and the one who met Pam first — is Joe, a native New Yorker who’s not the slightest bit sarcastic but rather a sweet, naive oddball. He composes songs all the time, crossing the street, talking to the homeless people he calls his friends. Think Daniel Johnston crossed with a goofy, young Wayne Coyne, if you’re up for an indie rock reference.
Joe’s unfiltered engagement with the world makes
him something of a social pariah — until it has a framework, like being in a band. But not long after the three start playing out together on lousy nights at CBGB, Pam gets pregnant.
With very little uncertainty, deliberation or planning, she decides to have the baby, putting her musical career on hold. She and Daniel have a low-key courthouse wedding, and he too puts his musical ambitions aside to record and release a single by Joe.
There’s something generational in their selfthwarted ambitions.
Gen X always had a tenuous relationship to fame, particularly its musicians. Newsstands (where people bought print media) were clogged with magazines (so many now closed) debating the perils of selling out. Was signing with a major label a way to get your music heard or a signal that you’d lost your soul? Kurt Cobain gave us his terrible, tragic answer in 1994.
Joe, by contrast, is immune from self doubt.
“Joe lacked the rock star’s standard neuroses,” Zink writes. “Unencumbered by the guilty suspicion that he was secretly a no-talent impostor, he had zero inhibitions about telling the world. Soon hundreds of people with no interest in music and less inclination to buy seveninch singles were quite pointlessly aware that he had one out. The mail carriers knew it, as did the transvestite from Essex Street with the Yorkies.”
He circulates in the city while babysitting Daniel and Pam’s daughter, Flora, whom he only drops once.
Zink traces the haphazard distribution of Joe’s singles with a collector’s eye, as if some future music historian will comment on their rarity. So it’s not a surprise that he improbably, inevitably lands a major-label record deal.
He’s a natural and committed musician, perhaps even a genius. And he’s so unencumbered that he’s as adaptable to the demands of a major label and rock stardom as he was to the Lower East Side.
It seems as if the narrative is set up to explore the conflicts between Joe’s fame and Daniel and Pam’s obscurity, but that doesn’t happen; instead, their bonds remain intact. Joe, when home from tour, even continues to babysit for Flora for years.
But when she’s 9, tragedy strikes: The planes hit the World Trade Towers on 9-11, and Joe dies.
This creates some confusion for Flora, as well as for the culture at large, which gets a mythologized version of his demise. What they don’t know is that he died doing something he didn’t want to in an uptown apartment with his girlfriend by his side. (Any similarities to Elliott Smith are purely coincidental).
To spare their daughter the health and psychic hazards of lower Manhattan after 9-11, they let her move in with Pam’s parents, now mellowed and reconciled. Flora starts school in Washington, D.C. — and stays permanently. Letting her go is as frictionless a decision for Pam and Daniel as it was to become parents in the first place, and Flora is basically raised by her grandparents.
Flora takes this quite well. Although Pam and Daniel remain in the story, it predominantly shifts to follow her growth from youth to college and after.
She’s self-possessed but full of contradictions. She studies soil conservation, then grows frustrated with the principle of it. She goes to Africa for a summer project and is alienated by her cohort. She wants to be an environmental activist but finds all routes lacking.
She is somehow simultaneously idealistic and cynical, which makes it hard for her to fully commit. Maybe part of that is the sarcasm Flora inherited from her parents, but they are a distant influence. She could perhaps have used a father figure more present in her daily life — she has a habit of dating men twice her age.
By the time 2015 rolls around, she has joined the Green Party, then, with her older boyfriend’s help, the Jill Stein campaign. She only works for Stein because she’s so sure Hillary Clinton will win. When Flora’s travels bring her close to a campaign worker who is more of true believer than she can ever be, it draws her to him.
To illustrate Flora’s conflicted feelings around political engagement, at the Women’s March she takes her pink hat on and off three times. Her grandmother knit three and wears hers. Pam refuses to put hers on.
Pam’s attitude — she’ll go, but she won’t join in — works for her, but as a legacy it jams up her daughter. Maybe it’s made more problematic because Flora tries to blend it with the habits of belief from her grandparents. As it is, she’s a Millennial burdened with saving the planet, who’s deeply conflicted about how to do that, or if she even should bother.
Flora takes over for half the book, a large portion of which sees her deciding one thing, then its opposite. Back and forth and back again.
The book is ingeniously Gen X in that it moves its own generation off center stage so a Millennial can take over. Pam and Daniel don’t disappear — they tinker with out-of-fashion music, weather the financial crisis and survive the changing face of New York City without changing much themselves.
When they face a final plot twist that Flora fears may be an environmental crisis, it’s also a nod to Don Delillo. What could be more Gen X than that?