Avalon

March 15, 2022
Kafka, King Arthur, and topiary hedges all play a part in this coming-of-age story from the author of Doxology (2019) and Private Novelist (2016). Zink's stories are filled with oddballs, and her latest novel is no exception. Bran is in fourth grade when her mother enters a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, leaving the girl in the care of her "common-law stepfather," Doug, in Torrance, California. She's been working at the plant nursery Doug's family runs since she was a toddler, so life as an unpaid laborer is the only life she's ever known, but being the only female in the house becomes increasingly uncomfortable after she hits adolescence--especially when the bikers come to party at the Henderson place. She makes her first friend when she's in the sixth grade. Jay is rich and gay and an aspiring--and singularly untalented--flamenco dancer. At UCLA, Jay meets Peter, and both Jay and Bran are instantly smitten. Peter's engagement to another woman does nothing to quell Bran's desire for him, nor does it stop Peter from repeatedly declaring his love for Bran. A lot of things happen to Bran--she runs away from the Henderson farm after a particularly harrowing encounter with the bikers; at Peter's insistence, she decides to try her hand at screenwriting; she gets a job as a barista--but her will-they, won't-they relationship with Peter is the narrative's central concern. The problem with this is that it's difficult to understand why Bran and Jay are so obsessed with Peter. Early on, Bran declares, "Throughout this text, I will employ the token '[...]' to indicate inability to quote, paraphrase, or reconstruct things Peter said," and this is a blessing because Peter is long-winded, pedantic, and occasionally condescending. He vacillates between praising Bran's beauty and brilliance and reminding her that she's not quite as smart as him. Bran has a lot in common with Penny, the engaging protagonist of Nicotine (2016), but Zink's new heroine is subsumed by her tiresome crush. A rather flat offering from an exceptional author.

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Starred review from March 21, 2022
Zink (Doxology) delves into class, art, and American culture in a characteristically witty bildungsroman. The narrator, Brandy, is raised on a topiary nursery in semirural California, where she provides unpaid labor from a young age in exchange for necessities; her late mother’s partner, Doug, also works there. Life improves when Brandy befriends Jay, an upper-class kid in love with flamenco, who enrolls at UCLA and crushes on classmate Peter, an East Coast intellectual-in-waiting. When Brandy meets Peter while visiting Jay, the two almost immediately fall in love, and the rest of the novel sets Brandy’s rough-cut brilliance in tension with Peter’s academic ambitions. She spends less time working for Doug and more time with Jay, sleeping on his floor and helping with film projects. Meanwhile, Peter gets engaged to a well-off woman who promises to make life “uncomplicated.” The characters let forth some hilariously caustic barbs against the film program’s bland progressive politics, such as when Peter encourages Brandy and Jay to upend a “social change” assignment: “You want to find out how you can tweak speculative utopias to make them palatable to your social-justice-warrior film school, and I think with libertarianism you’re on the right track.” Even more impactful than the intellectual ballistics is the tortured romance story. The style is all Zink’s own, and she’s as brilliant as ever here.

May 15, 2022
Zink (Doxology, 2019) has Bran, short for Brandy, tell the story of her unusual childhood in southern California on a topiary farm, where she earns her keep as an unpaid laborer for the rough-and-tumble owners. This volatile childhood forces her to fend for herself early on, and she finds an ally in Jay, an outgoing, aspiring choreographer. After Jay enrolls in UCLA, he introduces Bran to his classmate Peter, a self-assured academic, and Bran and Peter strike up a heady relationship, one that becomes complicated after Peter reveals that he is engaged and is transferring to Harvard. Bran, heartbroken, soon finds her living situation at the farm no longer tenable and seeks refuge in a friend's home. Here she begins to uncover her talent for writing and perceive a way forward. All the while, Bran remains drawn to Peter, who continues to send mixed and verbose signals from afar, leaving self-deprecating Bran struggling with her desires and the conflicts they arouse in light of the absurdities and projections of those around her. Zink's winding tale is sly and sharply rendered.

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