![Joke’s on you: Nell Zink has just published a new novel](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/11/TELEMMGLPICT000321171097_1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq1CyIvsrupbkMFQJlvsLIA0rIkxpoyLWSSbsbVf4ZzTM.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Nell Zink: ‘It amazes me that Americans put up with so much gun crime and inequality’
The US author's playful style has earned her cult status. She talks about her 20-year lust and why she’s written an ‘unfashionable’ romance
![Joke’s on you: Nell Zink has just published a new novel](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/11/TELEMMGLPICT000321171097_1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq1CyIvsrupbkMFQJlvsLIA0rIkxpoyLWSSbsbVf4ZzTM.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Nell Zink has no truck with the idea that it’s not possible for authors to tell certain stories right now. “It really puts me on edge,” she says. “Right now, it’s possible to tell any freaking story you want.”
She, for example, has chosen with her latest novel, Avalon, to write the sort of unfashionable love story in which a girl develops a massive crush on a boy and which the reader knows from the beginning will culminate, if not in a happy ending, then at least with the glimmer of one.
“I like happy endings,” she tells me. “It seems like in the discourse, or on Twitter, it’s not the thing these days for girls to develop huge crushes on boys. But [women] can be very inconsistent about this. One day they are a lesbian feminist and the next they want to get married in white.”
This is a typical statement from Zink: both tantalisingly playful and deadly serious. Her larky, super-smart, fizzily self-aware novels read like idealistic polemics – her characters tend to be activists or artists – and they dare you to wonder to what extent they’re posing as a joke. Zink has been a cult writer since publishing her first novel, The Wallcreeper, in 2014 at the age of 50, yet she is now a bona fide member of the literary establishment. Not that she considers her books to have become more mainstream as a result. “I don’t feel any commercial responsibility to my publishers,” she says. “It’s their fault if they invest in me, the suckers.”
Avalon, her sixth novel, takes place in California around 2010. (To have set it much later would have been, says Zink, to reckon with Trump – “and I’m not in the business of giving Trump publicity”.) Bran is an impoverished wannabe screenwriter trapped in a form of indentured living with her horticulturalist stepfather, Doug, following the death of her mother; Peter is a smart-alec student who’s engaged to someone else and likes to speak – whenever anyone will listen – about the fascist nature of contemporary art.
![Avalon is Nell Zink's sixth novel](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/11/TELEMMGLPICT000321684974_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqIlB8N0-eCKir34PrHbfoBIDwrxTXZUARyEWi5sfgXlA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Zink has strong views on this, believing popular culture to be largely in thrall to what she calls dystopian narratives that cynically exploit our fascination with disaster and death. “In the early 1990s it was impossible to find a snuff video. These days everyone is like, ‘Oh yeah, snuff videos, been there, seen that.’
“People complain about becoming desensitised to violence, but I think it makes them tetchy and fearful and more prone to violence. And this makes them more conservative and more prone to thinking about mortality. It freaks me out when people politicise death in this very Victorian way,” she continues. “And then they start talking like that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger about how death can lend your life existential meaning. And I’m like: ‘No.’ Because what gives people the strength to think about ways to save themselves is not thinking that it’s soon going to be over.”
Talking to Zink can sometimes feel like trying to converse with a speed boat without a driver. Yet, like her novels, she adheres to her own idiosyncratic logic. While Avalon is haunted by the dark side of Californian myth – it has a shadowy supporting cast featuring biker cults and violent men – one of its main concerns is whether it’s possible to make the world a better place through art.
And, yes, it’s also a romance, inspired (it turns out) by Zink’s 20-year infatuation with a man who, she confides, provided much of the source material for Peter. Does her infatuation have a happy ending? “Well, he’s in Zurich and I’m in Bern and during this time we’ve seen each other exactly once at someone else’s house and he talked all the time about a Danish performance artist. But it’s all very happy.”
![Nell Zink published her first novel The Wallcreeper in 2014](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/11/TELEMMGLPICT000321686235_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Zink is in Bern as part of a professional residency, but she has lived in a small town outside Berlin since 2000. She’d been writing privately for years but came to prominence thanks to her friendship with the novelist Jonathan Franzen, with whom she had struck up an epistolary relationship, and for whom she wrote The Wallcreeper – a marital comedy and environmental farce that begins with a miscarriage in a car – just to prove that she could.
“I never intended Wallcreeper to be published. I wrote it mainly as a letter to Jonathan,” she says. “It’s a habit of mine, writing novels as letters. Perhaps because I never thought anyone would want to publish anything I wrote.” To be fair, Zink – who has also worked as a bricklayer, secretary and editor of an indie-rock magazine – hadn’t been particularly interested in publishing anything in the first place. “It was only after friends took notice of what I was writing that I began to take an interest in contemporary literature and realised that the competition, you know, is not that stiff.”
Living in Germany, she says, allows her to see more clearly her home country, where most of her novels, which ostensibly read as high-wire satires of American culture, are set. “I keep hounding friends to join me in Berlin. It amazes me what American people will put up with. The gun crime. The number of people who have just been cut off economically, who hold down three jobs as labourers. And yet there are many millions of people who are as rich as sin, have great political weight, and make life almost impossible for everyone else.”
!['A letter to Jonathan': Nell Zink wrote The Wallcreeper for fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/01/11/TELEMMGLPICT000271984066_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Zink herself is not from your typical metropolitan elite. She had a bookish but ramshackle upbringing in what she calls the “Virginia sticks”, and says: “I’m definitely aware of what it’s like to be poor. When I was younger I passed for middle-class, but when I talk to people who really are middle-class, I find them unbelievably exotic. Jonathan Franzen, for example, comes from a really nice corporate suburb, full of people who play golf. But I spent years working in construction in Virginia. And I was raised to be really tolerant of poverty.”
For all her characters’ questioning idealism in Avalon, Zink has a Marxist faith in material circumstance as the only thing that really matters. Certainly not art. “Novels are a trivial phenomenon in the grand scheme of things,” she says. “They don’t change a thing.”
Why, then, does she write them? “Because we are conscious we need to make sense of the world,” she says. “It’s infantilising to say art doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change the material conditions of existence. But at the same time, the fact that it doesn’t gives you a certain amount of freedom. In my case, to produce ambiguous works that confuse people.”
Is she joking? I’m honestly not sure.
Avalon is published by Faber today