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.”
