Nell Zink - The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth

Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2014.

Nell Zink’s debut novel follows a downwardly mobile secretary from Philadelphia who marries an ambitious soon-to-be-expat pharmaceutical researcher in hopes that she will never work again. They end up in Germany, where it turns out that her new husband is tougher, sneakier, more sincere, more contradictory, and smarter than she is; she’d naturally thought it was impossible. Life becomes complicated with affairs, birding, and eco-terrorism. Bad things happen, yet they stagger through, clinging to each other from a safe distance. Eventually our heroine commences building a life of her own, in imitation of her husband, one soggy brick at a time.

"Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn't. I don't know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I've read in years. And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. I hope he doesn't kill Nell Zink."—

"Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. You might not want to believe this, but her sentences and stories are so strong and convincing that you'll have no choice."—Jonathan Franzen

Zink’s debut novel is a weird, funny, sad, and sharp story of growing up. Opening with a car accident in which young married couple Tiffany and Stephen hit a wallcreeper (a bird that Stephen, a fanatical birder, adopts as a pet and names Rudolf), causing Tiffany to miscarry, the bulk of the novel follows the couple’s push-and-pull years in Europe. Stephen, a stubborn and secretive pharmaceutical researcher stationed in Berne, makes enough money to support both of them; and Tiffany, who was bored at her last real job as a secretary, makes no bones about not wanting to work. In many ways, Tiffany and Stephen are the perfect match: they are both capricious, unfaithful (Stephen even sleeps with Tiffany’s “bikini barista” sister, with Tiffany’s blessing), and unsure of themselves. Their marriage is really just a loose agreement, and they spend most of the story drifting around each other: Stephen suffers an inner crisis and moves to Albania to study birds, while Tiffany, who’s never had to work hard, passes her days alone on the Elbe tearing down levees to flood a forest in need of water. “I couldn’t come up with a step I’d taken in life for my own sake,” she says. Written in short, fragmentary sections, Zink masterfully captures the slippery nature of human intimacy, the ways in which relationships both thrive on emotional gray areas and jump from one black-and-white area to another (jealousy and indifference; blame and forgiveness; listlessness and wonder). This is the introduction of an exciting new voice. - Publishers Weekly




It opens with a wallcreeper — a small, beautiful, and territorial bird found in Eurasia — and a miscarriage. It ends with death and muted self-actualization. In between, there is (a lot) of adulterous sex, the repeated buildup and breakdown of a marriage, eco-terrorism, and a waterfall of observations about contemporary social and romantic life wrapped in an excruciating wit that suggests its author, Nell Zink, is anything but a novice. The Wallcreeper, in fact, is the best debut novel of the year by an American author, and it should be read and discussed by anyone who cares about young life in the 21st century.

Not much is known about Nell Zink: this much is confirmed by the scant publicity materials and coverage afforded to her work thus far. She appears to have been “discovered” — at least in America — by Jonathan Franzen, a fellow birder. Prior to writing The Wallcreeper, she apparently started a post-punk zine in the 1990s, and, more recently, she has published with the journal n+1. (Keith Gessen and Franzen wrote the jacket copy.) According to a Q&A provided by her publisher, the excellent Dorothy books, Zink is an American expatriate living in Germany.
Given that The Wallcreeper takes place primarily in the cities and rural regions of Germany and broader Europe, this would seem to suggest that the novel is a Kunstlerroman, or an autobiographical novel that charts its own path to creation. But even this is left in question, given how little we know of Zink’s prehistory. We do know, though, that Zink has written fiction before. Only, in the vein of Kafka, these works were written for friends: other novelists and poets like Zohar Eitan and Avner Shats. (She calls these works “impromptus,” a name that calls to mind Graham Greene’s “entertainments.”) The Wallcreeper, as it happens, began as an impromptu written as a letter to Franzen, who had given Zink “stern” encouragement to write for a broader audience. I mention all of this because it’s utterly baffling that such a painful, hilarious, and thoroughly accomplished novel could be a first attempt.
The driver of the novel, its protagonist and voice, is Tiffany, a thoroughly contemporary personality that somehow hearkens back to the Brontë’s and Jane Austin (and Zink confirms that Austen is a reference for The Wallcreeper). After hastily entering into a marriage with Stephen, an intelligent, drug-addled audiophile with a burgeoning interest in birdwatching, Tiffany quickly becomes sexually — and often romantically — disenfranchised with young married life. (Elif Batuman’s recent piece on marriage as abduction chimes here.) But Tiffany, who often riffs on her financial and intellectual dependence on Stephen, quickly takes flight once the couple relocates to Europe, where they decide to move (more or less) on a whim. In this way, the escapism (to Europe or Asia) of the young characters recalls recent novels by Tao Lin, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner. Only in the case of Zink’s Tiffany, this constant movement (which marks the plot) is propelled more by sexual precarity and lust than run-of-the-mill existential malaise.
As the all-too-lifelike tug-and-pull of disaffection propels the couple throughout Europe, where they are increasingly enmeshed in birding and, eventually, ecological action, the couple becomes atomized. Tiffany begins to sleep with other men, at first casually, but often out of a love that, as the novel moves forward, she cannot separate from unbridled lust. Emotionally guarded to a fault, Stephen, aware of Tiffany’s affairs, then begins to take up his own sexual and romantic liaisons, but the marriage remains tremulously intact. As a salient, honest, and totally necessary depiction of 21st century marriage, in other words, The Wallcreeper is both raw and refreshing.
The novel may not be read as a story about the frustration and futility of environmental activism — and this is a good way to make it sound more boring than it is — but it should be, in a way. Zink expertly short-circuits political and romantic life. As her marital commitments dissolve, Tiffany’s commitment to environmental activism intensifies. The novel culminates in an act of environmental sabotage that comes across as both more studied and more convincing than many of Don DeLillo’s comparable moves, if mostly because Zink is gifted with an eye (and an ear) for romantic, cultural, and ecological habitats.
Given that The Wallcreeper was written as a letter for Franzen (as a kind of dare), there is no shortage of birding metaphors. Early in the novel, when Stephen reduces the lives of birds to “breeding and feeding,” Tiffany is lightly annoyed. But the theme recurs; much of the novel, it might be said, concerns the very human acts of “breeding and feeding,” or sex and survival. But the novel also suggests that just as birds in their environment should be loved for their manifold beauty, so should human lives, despite all appearances, not be reduced to avarice and selfishness. At the heart of the novel is the image of the wallcreeper, a bird that Stephen and Tiffany attempt to keep in captivity before releasing it into the wild, where it is quickly (and hilariously) eaten by a hawk. Tiffany too is captivated, in more ways than one, by the men she loves, but, by the nove’s conclusion, she is revealed to be more than the sum of her captors.
In an interview with her publisher, Nell Zink reveals her philosophy of the novel in striking terms:

My least favorite novels find the courage to say the crass thing everybody is thinking. My favorite novels work to resolve the dissonances that most trouble their honest, eloquent authors. But literary novels are art for art’s sake, whatever the subject matter.

The dissonances that Zink works to resolve in The Wallcreeper crack with political and social urgency. It’s a major debut, one that proves its author is gifted, strangely and beguilingly, with no shortage of honesty and eloquence. - Jonathon Sturgeon


excerpt:

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage. Immediately obvious was my sticky forehead. Maybe I was unconscious for a couple of seconds, I don’t know. Eventually I saw Stephen poking around the front of the car and said, “Jesus, what was that.”
He leaned in the window and said, “Hey, you’re bleeding. Hold on a second.” He crossed behind the car, looked both ways, and retrieved the bird from the opposite ditch.
I opened the door and put my feet outside, threw up, and lay down, not in the vomit but near it. The fir tops next to me had their roots at the bottom of a cliff.
“Can I use this bread bag?” Stephen asked. “Tiff? Tiff?” He kneeled next to me. “That was stupid of me. I shouldn’t touch you after handling this bird. Can you hear me? Tiff?”
He helped me into the back seat and I lay down on the bread. He said head wounds always bleed like that. I said he should have kept quiet. I lost the ability to see and began to hyperventilate a bit. The car pulled back on to the road. From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, “Twee.”
“Open the bag!” I cried.
“Twee!” it said again.
Stephen pulled over and busied himself with it for a moment. He said, “I thought it was dead. I just wanted to get it off the road. I was going to have it prepared or something, I don’t know. You should see its wings. For me it’s a lifer. It’s like the most wonderful bird. But it’s a species of least concern and actually they’re all over the place except anyplace you would normally go. I identified it even before I hit it.Tichodroma muraria! It was unmistakable, just like they said it would be. So this is great. Dead is not a tick as far as I’m concerned. I identified it before I hit it anyway. It really is unmistakable. You should see it, Tiff. I’m rambling on like this because you might have a concussion and you’re not supposed to sleep.”
“Put on music.”
The wallcreeper protested. “Twee!”
I stayed awake by retching, and Stephen drove defensively but swiftly back to Interlaken.
           
Read an essay by Nell Zink at n+1.