Culture

Nell Zink’s Satire Raises the Stakes


At what point did it no longer seem possible to satirize the world we live in? Was it when the Commander-in-Chief called himself a “very stable genius”? The “covfefe” tweet? Or the news alerts that seem to make the very idea of jokes unserious or unseemly? Satire reveals truth through exaggeration. The task becomes more difficult when everyone agrees that reality has gone too far.

The funny, ravenous, and strange novels of Nell Zink look at American culture from the fringes, following activists and misfits as they contend with the absurdities of the modern world. Her first book, “The Wallcreeper,” tells the story of a woman who leaves her husband to commit ecoterrorism while taking on a string of deadbeat lovers. In “Mislaid,” a white lesbian passes as black in order to get away from her gay husband. “Nicotine” follows squatters in New Jersey whose homes are divided by identitarian interests, such as feminism, indigenous rights, and smoking.

Zink’s satires are not restrained by the conventions of social politeness or narrative structure. Characters uncover secrets only to be killed off; they get pregnant, married, and separated within a few dozen fervent pages. The most consistent quality of her books is a desire to flout rules. One plot hinges on buckets of feces; another features P.T.A. moms learning about Michel Foucault’s thoughts on sex. This satire is especially angled at those who want to turn the margins into a movement. “Why exactly 20-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money,” a character in “The Wallcreeper” reflects. The tenants’-rights activists in “Nicotine” are as concerned about their own living standards as they are about any universal right to housing. “You want to control the left,” another character says, “offer it cheap rent.” It’s exciting and cool to be part of a group that’s trying to change the world, the novels suggest. But don’t forget: those attempts usually go nowhere.

Zink knows the fringe herself. She spent the first decades of her career writing for an audience of one at a time, seemingly unconcerned by whether her work reached a broader public. Born in Virginia, she lived abroad in Israel and then in Germany, working as a bricklayer and as a secretary, among other jobs. The novels she wrote took the form of e-mails to friends. The recipient of one such e-mail was Jonathan Franzen, who helped her publish her first novel, with a small feminist press, for a three-hundred-dollar advance.

Since then, the novels have become sleeker, and the presses larger. And, in a testament to her skill, time has seen much of Zink’s satire confirmed by the news. Ecoterrorism loses the aura of absurdity when every month brings a new estimate of the coming death toll from our melting ice caps. Shortly after Zink published a novel about a white woman passing as black, Rachel Dolezal, a Washington State N.A.A.C.P. chapter president, revealed that she was born white but had built a career passing as African-American. These revelations point to Zink’s sharp eye and sense of timing. But they also raise the stakes. What happens to a satirist who sees her darkest visions made real?

When we first meet Pam Bailey and Daniel Svoboda, in “Doxology” (Ecco), Zink’s newest novel, they are navigating familiar Zink territory, the grungy world of young people, making plans and art. It’s New York in the late eighties, and both Pam and Daniel have moved to the city to escape families that did not encourage creative expression (Beltway Protestants and Midwestern evangelicals, respectively). They form a band called Marmalade Sky with Joe Harris, a friendly singer with “no more wrinkles on him than an action figure” and a “case of high-functioning Williams syndrome.”

The first half of the book follows Pam and Daniel as they make their way through the intricacies of this subculture. The friends meet to jam and prowl the Lower East Side. Pam becomes pregnant unintentionally and takes the name Svoboda at city hall. The newlyweds hire Joe to watch over baby Flora. Spending time with a child turns out to be an excellent career move: Joe’s baby-babble lyrics land him a record deal and stardom. “Ruins meets Badfinger in a jar of Gerber’s” reads a review in an underground zine.

Zink narrates this story in a deadpan third person. Her sentences are little nuggets, in careful equipoise between high irony and mere accuracy: “Post-punk women had exchanged duct tape on their nipples for heels and cocktail dresses without compromising their ironic focus on objectification by the male gaze and the appropriation of epithets intended to belittle and demean them.” It is not always clear where, exactly, these jabs are meant to land.

These pronouncements guide the plot toward a growing sense of political foreboding. As Pam and Daniel watch their friend’s rise to fame, “Operation Desert Shield marched inexorably toward war. . . . There was officially a recession on.” The politics of Zink’s dry narration are defined by the sharpness of her bite, no matter who is getting bitten. The novel presents a sardonic view of violence, war, and climate change, as well as the actions required to counter climate change. Here is Zink on the Middle East: “A CNN correspondent was trapped in Baghdad. He described his fear in great detail, conveying a sense that war was ultra-scary. . . . Plucky little Israel had fended off repeated Arab invasions, and not through the power of prayer.”

As the novel unfolds, the reader isn’t sure whether its portraits count as realism or as satire. The novel seems to approach the sweeping, multigenerational sagas of Zink’s pen pal Franzen. In tone and structure, “Doxology” sheds Zink’s usual frantic energy. But, even as she turns toward the cadences of social realism, Zink fights its constraints. She places potholes along her paved road. A “Somali epileptic with one leg” is introduced and ignored after a single line—one of Zink’s many small provocations that flare and swiftly fizzle.

On September 11th, Joe overdoses on heroin. Pam and Daniel, worried that the city has become unsafe, have taken young Flora to Washington, D.C., where she is reared by her grandparents. Flora gets a Cadillac education—cathedral school and unlimited grandparental attention. The result is a strange combination of ideology and careerist pragmatism. Flora, brought up to believe that climate change is a pressing problem, has become passionate about sustainable development.

Her commitment, however, runs up against the limitations of every available outlet for change. A college trip to Ethiopia to study soil science is enough to convince her that activism can’t happen incrementally. After graduation, she forgoes a master’s degree and takes a menial position at the Sierra Club. “To acquire leverage,” Zink writes, “a would-be professional do-gooder must commit to long stints of unpaid work.” Flora can’t imagine making a life for herself outside establishment channels. She starts to volunteer with the Green Party, and her cynicism about the efficacy of her work soars to greenhouse-gas levels.

The outside world circles and intrudes: we find ourselves in 2016. Trump is running for President. Flora meets a Democratic Party operative named Bull Gooch at a Green Party event and they start dating. Bull encourages her to climb up the Greens’ low branches: “He assumed she would do the Greens more harm than good.”

Here the novel seems not to know whether it should compete with the news or outdo it. The characters are all drawn to the threat against the White House. Pam and Daniel grouse when Flora goes to work for the Jill Stein campaign, and yet:

Ultimately it seemed sufficient consolation to them both to sit at home drinking coffee and reading in the New York Times that there was an 85 percent chance of a Democratic win. It was soothing, like a cross between an 85 percent chance of a refreshing late-summer rain and Hillary somehow polling at 85 percent of likely voters, though not even Pam could come up with a plausible explanation for the source of the number.

Bull wants to spread the rumor that Trump has been involved in a pedophilia ring. “Character assassination works,” he argues in front of Clinton Party operatives, who refuse to run negative ads. We know what’s coming. Soon Bull informs Flora that the same charges have been levelled at the Clinton campaign by the Pizzagaters.

Zink sends Flora out into contested territory: Towanda, Pennsylvania. Flora begins an affair with Aaron, a Clinton staffer assigned to knock on doors in the same Zip Codes. When Flora talks with Aaron about climate change, he gives her a bleak picture of the political situation without trying to make light of it: “There was no sarcasm or anger in his delivery. He meant it word for word—a deadpan vision of darkness—but he was beaming while he said it. He was trying and failing to feel implicated in the sad state of the world.”

Feeling implicated and implicating others emotionally in the state of the world—this is also a task for novelists. Zink’s presentation of Democratic stupidity or the limitations of corporate environmentalism is one way of highlighting the absurdity of our era: not by exaggeration but by changing its context. Like “Saturday Night Live” comedians reading the President’s tweets on air, it’s a way of folding one genre into another, of showing the madness of the real by casting it in another light. Zink’s move toward realism may be her attempt to take material that her readers have spent three years mulling over and make it fresh—an attempt to stop stretching reality and acknowledge it instead.

That is one way of confronting a reality that seems ludicrous to its core. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist,” Philip Roth remarked in his 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction,” decades before a porn star went on television to compare the President’s penis to a mushroom. By hewing more closely to a shared idea of the present, Zink may be using her talents not to invent but to understand. Notably, the book leaves Trump in the background. Zink is looking at the rest of us, entangling her readers in a state of affairs they’ve seen develop around them.

But this shakiness between reality and satire also suggests some skepticism about what, precisely, a novelist—or an activist or any individual—can accomplish. Zink’s characters are essentially powerless—powerless against big labels, against environmental catastrophe, against the political-financial complex. The characters don’t even have the force that comes from conviction. As Flora becomes a Green Party fixture, she finds that “politics no longer excited her. She knew why she chanted slogans: she needed regular doses of trance inducement to mask the struggle’s increasing difficulty and diminishing marginal returns.” But satire needs people to believe in the power of speech if it’s to be effective. It depends on the idea that words can act where there is no money and no might. If words have no power, then satire doesn’t have any, either. It becomes an eye roll rather than a weapon.

Zink has spent her career probing the extent to which people on the fringes can change the world around them. But what does making art mean in a world where no creation can bring together individuals who feel flattened by politics? Midway through the novel, Joe Harris comes back in spirit when his cover of “Bird in God’s Garden”—“a neo-pseudo-Sufi-hippie-Gnostic number”—becomes an unexpected hit. (A New Yorker profile appears, full of mistakes.) It’s difficult to imagine “a nation” that would gather around a single song. Part of the reason that Zink’s barbs, however pointed, seem to ricochet from one victim to the next is that they lack the conviction that they’ll land on a public ready to respond. How do you empower people who can unite only through dread?

Flora’s affair with Aaron leads to pregnancy. Like her mother, she decides to keep the child: “Abortion had little appeal for her. Her life plan had always included children. . . . She was young and underemployed. Why not go for it?” At the end of the novel, neither Bull nor Aaron is involved, and Flora is back in New York contemplating the challenge of rearing a child on her own.

“Count your blessings,” Daniel tells his daughter. “You’re a free woman now under the matriarchy, about to reinvent family life in accordance with feminist principles.” And then: “He rolled his eyes.” ♦



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.