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.
