in California in a world of gang-affiliated bikers.’ Photograph: welcomia/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Bran, the narrator of Nell Zink’s latest novel, is abandoned by her parents as a child, and grows up in southern California with the criminal family of her mother’s ex-boyfriend, the Hendersons. From early childhood she is used by them as unpaid labour in the plant nursery they run as a front operation. It’s a world of gang-affiliated bikers and exploited immigrant labourers, where Bran sleeps in an unheated lean-to and lives on canned food warmed with propane. But, in the way of fictional characters, Bran is meant for better things, and the book describes her haphazard rise into the ranks of the middle-class artistic precariat.
Zink is both a very satisfying and a frustrating writer. Her plots are shapeless but oddly propulsive. Her narrative style is a tissue of quips that strays into glibness, even in her best work. Within it, though, something more substantial is always implicit, and now and then she turns and directly addresses it with a clarity that feels almost violent. Her writing often has a slapdash manner that suggests she’s too authentic to waste sweat on anything as cheap as fiction, and this has the interesting quality of making the reader feel more authentic, too. All these things are present in Avalon, and make it a pleasure, as all Zink’s work is. But one other Zink hallmark goes badly awry here.
Zink likes to situate her characters within subcultures: the world of environmental activism in The Wallcreeper, anarchist squats in Nicotine, the music business in Doxology. She satirises these and mines them for quirky details, but also speaks of them with authority and love. The great flaw in Avalon’s conception is that Zink tries to work this trick with the lowlife world of the Hendersons, but without the intimacy or the love. She has nothing but contempt for these characters, and they remain vague and one-dimensional. All they do is express crass bigotry and demand unpaid labour from the hapless Bran.
The tone is uneven and it’s often hard to tell if something is meant to be funny or seriously horrifying. We don’t really know how to take it when Grandpa Larry, the paterfamilias of the Hendersons, demands to see the circumcised penis of one of Bran’s Jewish friends as “an elaborate joke”. Should we feel relieved or disgusted when we’re told Bran isn’t bullied at school because her common-law stepbrother was “widely reputed to have beaten an injured coyote to death with a bicycle lock”? There’s a running gag about how Grandpa Larry won’t call his undocumented immigrant labourers by their names, instead calling them all Eric, Roger and Simon. “Each Eric was replaced with an Eric and each Roger with a Roger, Simon being optional for the Easter and Christmas rush.” When this is introduced, it seems to be a joke about Larry’s casual racism. But Bran, too, calls these workers Eric, Roger and Simon throughout the book, and it’s never clear why; she works and lives alongside them, and would have ample opportunity to learn their names.
When Bran begins to escape into a world of brainy misfits, the book improves dramatically. Her best friend, Jay, is devoted to the art of flamenco but his teacher is almost completely blind, and thus can’t help him with the fact that his dancing is an embarrassing mess. This may sound like an unconvincing sitcom premise, but in Zink’s hands, it becomes a serious examination of the nature of art. Even better is Bran’s infatuation with the hyper-erudite Peter, who spellbinds her with references to Arthurian legend and French theory, and becomes her informal life coach and almost-boyfriend. These characters are maddeningly predictable and frighteningly unpredictable in the way of real people.
Zink’s writing also takes off in these sections. A lot of authors, even very good ones, write prose that seems designed to win the approval of a focus group of typical readers. When Zink is on form, her writing is a wild ride down a steep hill, into a creek, up the other bank, through a henhouse and finally off a cliff only to land safely in a wagon full of hay. Here is Bran reflecting on Jay’s terrible dancing: “ … it was good, being an authentic part of Jay, but no more made for exposure than his gallbladder or hypothalamus. Only by shutting my eyes could I nullify the critical voice of the advancing darkness we look to for salvation, which was also my voice.” And here is a first kiss: “We kissed like Roland blowing his horn at Roncesvalles, with desperation, yet no host of angels materialised to tell him it was okay to get buyer’s remorse and ditch that girl.” Avalon is worth the cover price for the fun of these sentences alone.
Bran’s persistent thought about Peter is “I felt I was being fucked with, and I liked it a lot.” When everything’s working, that’s what it’s like to read Zink. Avalon gives you many moments of this, but diluted and blunted by the unfortunate choice at the centre of its plot. It’s still a pleasure, and will give you more that’s genuinely new than 99% of books to be published this year. But if you were setting out to read all of Zink’s work, you might want to leave this one for last.
• Avalon is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
