Anatomy of an American Family and National Memory: Nell Zink’s Doxology

One of Zink’s missions is to navigate how the absence of one life continues to play on those left alive.

DoxologyThe past few weeks on his podcast WTF, actor and comedian Marc Maron has been delivering his usual pre-interview monologue, bringing listeners up to date on his life, his challenges with staying clean and sober, and, most recently, the suicide of David Berman, the singer-songwriter best known for his work with the Silver Jews. Maron composes his memory of a “hangout” session with Berman in Nashville, recalling how “he just told me the story, the whole David Berman story.” One facet of Nell Zink’s fifth novel, Doxology, is the death of a fictional indie musician, Joe Harris, whose absence is forever present within the book’s pages, tinging them with the same kind of grief present in Maron’s voice. But while Maron explores loss in the immediate aftermath of a death, recalling the “light” a figure like Berman gave off, Zink traces the effects of loss over the course of decades. Throughout, one of her missions is to navigate how the absence of one life continues to play on those left alive.

Decisions amass, one upon another in Doxology, a wide-spreading mural portraying the lives of an American family—Pam and Daniel and their daughter, Flora—from the late ’80s to the modern day. Zink alternates her narrative between her protagonists quickly and often. Instead of dedicating whole chapters to, say, Pam’s perspective, multiple voices will share the page at once. Zink’s use of the third-person enables her to dance from character to character, one paragraph after the other. At one moment, we’re at a New York farmer’s market with Daniel, and in the next, we will be at an Ian MacKaye show with Flora. Zink never sticks with one character for longer than a page at a time, building a pace which isn’t unlike that of her characters, so quick-witted and always in motion, questioning their lives and relationships but united as a family, manifested through their shared space on the page.

Pam, Daniel, and Joe, all young and working crummy jobs at the start of the book, are united by their obsession with punk rock. Reminiscent of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Zink’s language has a melodic quality, her long, crisp sentences enhanced by precise punctuation and smart alliteration. Every character is fast-talking and ceaselessly witty; they appear to be performing like the musicians they desire to become, their use of language a kind of instrument. And like a good lyricist, Zink doesn’t waste a line of dialogue on anything uninteresting or even mildly benign. Everything feels just a little bit sped up, like an Aaron Sorkin production, but there’s also whimsy and joy in Zink’s prose, which brings passion to subjects as dry as soil aptitudes and door-to-door political canvassing.

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Friends and bandmates, Pam, Daniel, and Joe are lovable and flawed, essential and aimless. Joe has “a case of high-functioning Williams syndrome,” and he ropes the gang together with unbending affability and an endearing trust in the world that helps to balance Pam and Daniel’s more cautious approach to record executives and groupies. Pam is the “retro hippie earth mother” who ran away from her parents in D.C. to Manhattan with 70 dollars “she’d earned by selling her father’s audio receiver and VCR to a pawn shop,” and Daniel is “an eighties hipster” who “lived in a state of persistent ecstasy.” Their stories build, mingle, and mesh as they attempt to start their own punk band, eventually leading to Daniel and Pam’s marriage, Flora’s birth, and Joe’s serendipitous slippage into indie stardom.

Doxology, though, isn’t a solely about music, as Zink is also concerned with shared national traumas and the idea of re-experiencing the past 30 years of American politics. She shows why she’s one of America’s great contemporary novelists through her sharp shift of focus, capturing a multitude of landscapes from the wide vistas of American music and politics, to the finer details of sustainable farming, computer programming, and D.C. parks. The wealth of knowledge that Zink brings to her novel is generous, guiding us through moments in America’s recent past—the millennium shift, the dot-com bubble, 9/11, the housing crash—with a firm sense of authority. She throws all sorts of complications at her characters, tracing how they react, adapt, continue to live, and move on like so many of us had to.

After the Twin Towers collapse, the story shifts to Flora’s coming of age. She’s sent to live with her grandparents in D.C. as the toxic dust settles, and as her life with them is close to utopic, Pam and Daniel can’t rationalize moving her back to New York, where everything smells like asbestos. So they place her in a D.C. private school, where her intelligence is incubated by teachers who see her potential. Throughout, Zink’s descriptions of place are simultaneously cynical, comical, and beautiful. There’s a sense that we’re caught in the most vivid of dreams, an impression that’s hardly diminished as Zink juggles between Flora’s life in D.C. and Pam and Daniel’s in New York. It’s here where Flora becomes interested in saving the planet, studying green sustainability, ultimately leading her to understand that those in power are really the ones who can enact change. As she blossoms into a little genius, she becomes entangled in the Green Party, hoping this will lead her to something bigger.

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Though Pam and Daniel still appear in the novel’s second half, they’re cast as secondary characters, and their roundness noticeably dulled down. Their conflicts no longer drive the novel forward, as it’s Flora who’s given the wheel. Thus, she must be nothing short of exceptional in order to hold our attention, often unbelievably so: a deeply liberal intellectual with some life-altering conservative choices, an atheist who sits in cathedrals to obtain deeper wisdom under the watchful eye of a god she doesn’t believe in, a passionate socialist canvasing for Jill Stein with parents who stumble into being millionaires. She often seems philosophically inconsistent as Zink tries to make her incessantly admirable. Every time Flora seems to have reached an existential breaking point, Zink pulls her out of the trench without seeing the trauma through to its natural end. Zink undoubtably wants Flora to be “indestructible,” a word which “seemed to Flora like a pretty basic thing to be. Useful, possibly, but minimal. She wanted more than that.” Bullets bounce off Flora like Superman, and it’s often hard to empathize with a character whose path appears determined for success regardless of how many mistakes she makes on the way.

Still, Zink’s writing remains enthralling in spite of not seeing all of her conflicts fully through to their ends. Like Flora, Zink understands the cynicism of our world but still she shows us moments of humor, humanity, how we can continue to shape our lives despite a world out of our own control. As the novel slowly looms towards modern day, its finality recalls how we got here and a need to brace ourselves for what’s going to come next. If we’ve learned anything from recent history, there will probably be a few unexpected twists coming our way. In the end, this anxiety is personified by Flora, the novel’s greatest gift and biggest challenge.

Nell Zink’s Doxology is now available from Ecco.

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Alex Eaker

Alex Eaker has his MFA from the College of Charleston. His writing can be found in SmokeLong Quarterly, Eclectica Magazine, and The Esthetic Apostle.

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