But general anesthesia isn’t a menu item, because the hospice is run like one of those brothels that are nominally strip clubs. Fill my heart.” Thereupon sunlight fills her heart (inexplicable process defying prose description).Īlso from Nicotine, when the protagonist’s dying father misunderstands a hospice director’s coded, illegal question about whether he’d want anesthesia: One day she climbs a small but steep and jagged peak, and standing on the top, she takes off her shirt and says to the sun, “Sunlight.

She walks the hills on the hottest days alone. From Nicotine, on a smoker’s second day after going cold turkey: Serious things get immediately undercut, robbing them of any pathos, yet without losing their seriousness. Moods and rhetorical gambits shift rapidly the beckoning index finger turns into an up-yours. What Zink excels at-what makes for the best emails-is a tone of brilliant offhandedness. Reading Zink feels more like listening in than being solicited. No audience-not even the hothouse drama of the MFA workshop or the cozy reassurance of a coterie-beyond one: the situation leaves Zink free to swerve as unpredictably as she likes through her stories, to dilate and summarize and skip, to presume everything she wants to presume and nothing she doesn’t. What seems to liberate Zink is the occasion, or the fantasy, of one-on-one communication. It’s worth thinking about email, and what it means to email well, when trying to assess what Zink’s fiction is so good at and why so many people have taken to her so quickly. We should all be so lucky to have, or better yet be, such a mischievous and inventive (and let’s face it, effective) correspondent most of us, even if we claim some kind of wit, freeze into cliché before the depressingly familiar interface of an email client. Her third novel, Nicotine, arrives alongside Private Novelist, a collection of two long early stories that were written as epistolary installments, in 19, to her friend the Israeli writer Avner Shats her first novel, The Wallcreeper, started as a look-what-I-can-do rebuke to Franzen’s suggestion that she write something publishable. Journalists have described the deluge of digital provocations, corrections, and ludic embellishments that accompany her formal interviews. The story of how she brazenly initiated a correspondence with Jonathan Franzen, convincing him over time to act as her agent and promoter, is now a kind of fable. By all accounts, Nell Zink writes fantastic emails.

Private novelist nell zink