Messy, meandering desire: How love works in the novels of Nell Zink

“I’m asking you right now to risk your life and health for my reproductive success,” says Stephen, to his wife Tiff. It is the day after he has given her his blessing to abscond from a dubstep loft party to have sex with her boyfriend Elvis in his “wind-struck farmhouse”. Married almost on a whim after a months-long courtship, the pair are little more than strangers to one another, and Tiff, the narrator, even more a stranger to herself. “I couldn’t come up with a step I’d taken in life for my own sake” she concludes, towards the novel’s end, by which time, the pair have treated their union with an increasingly destructive disregard.

Scenes such as this, from Nell Zink’s dynamite first novel The Wallcreeper, don’t exactly ring through the ears as serious endorsements of settling down and tying the knot. In fact, the portrayal of marriage in her books is almost always ambivalent if not downright negative, and when an interviewer once asked why this was the case, the answer was illuminating.

Having twice been through the matrimony game herself, Zink replied, she had come to a few choice conclusions. Asking someone to marry you, she now felt, is akin to asking that person to never fall in love ever again. “Probably the worst thing you can say to someone,” she offered, in the dry, urbane manner that typifies her portraits of overeducated counter-culturalists and polyamorous misfits. It also offers, in capsule, one of the prevailing ideas that runs through her fiction: that the live, messy stuff of desire can never be cut off in the name of a contract.

Her characters are often steered by half-baked political excuses and unmentioned sexual appetites, making the overall effect of her novels like a Cubist artwork portraying every lustful angle at once, where contradictory desires are laid on top of each other in glorious disarray. Or to quote Jazz, the Peshmerga-adjacent anarchist of Nicotine: “That’s why I live in reality. It never stops changing. It’s like shadows on smoke. But at least there’s only one of it.” In Zink’s fiction, the reality of desire is no different. It is always changing, and never easy to read, but it’s always inescapably there. It comes for the married and the unmarried alike, and pays no mind to ideas of legality and social cohesion.

Take, for instance, Peggy and Lee, the galaxy-crossed and decidedly homosexual lovers of Mislaid, who stumble into a heterosexual liaison for reasons neither of them can quite comprehend. Peggy’s sexual appetite is “just about infinite” as a consequence of “looking at girls and thinking about fucking them for five solid years” during her repressed adolescence, while Lee finds Peggy to be “androgynous like the boys he liked”, even though her body is inescapably female: “Everywhere he touched, it curved away from him, fleeing.” Both are “mystified” by their attraction to one another and the love that exists within their shotgun marriage lasts a mere 20 pages.

In this way, Zink’s fiction is awash with slippery labels and definitions that intentionally wear away at any fixed idea of the world’s limits and structures (of which the bourgeois institution of marriage is just one social convention ripe for disassembly). There are upper-middle-class business students with one fake-Shaman animist for a parent and an actual member of the Kogi tribe for another (though she’s now a Wall Street higher-up). Rockstars whose undiagnosed “high-functioning Williams syndrome” is interpreted as a sort of surrealist pop-art genius. The type of characters who can arrive at a terminal confusion around their gender and sexuality thanks to a stray comment about the fit of their gym shorts. Perpetually buffeted from one confusing emotional encounter to another, they succeed best—both romantically and existentially—when riding through the uncertainty by approaching life itself like a constant beginner. 

In Nicotine, a pair of half-siblings, Penny and Matt, have designs on evicting squatters from their grandparents’ former home, but give up on the idea almost as soon as they meet two of the “uncommonly attractive” hard-Left refuseniks who have occupied the house since its abandonment. Penny is driven crazy by Rob (“a living embodiment of masculine self-reliance”) who claims to be asexual but may in fact be masking some deep-seated erectile issues. Matt loses possession of his senses thanks to Jazz, a Kurdish-American “fox” who brings a loaded handgun to a clandestine hotel meet so they can grapple over it while fucking. Both of the siblings are chewn up and spat out by the magnetic quality of their anarchic inamoratas because they crave a conventional relationship with people they have found in the worst imaginable place to go looking for it. Penny and Matt can’t help but bring bourgeois preconceptions into their relationships with two people who live in defiance of such ideas, who behave towards others as they do towards their squat house: enjoying them and tending to their needs, but never really laying claim to any exclusive rights of use.

This too is typical of Zink’s characters, so often existing on the fringes of society, living off-grid amongst biker communities or conditions of quasi-genteel poverty, making them both better able to critique the social norms they’ve escaped from and uniquely vulnerable to them, precisely because it is so hard to break out of normative structures such as monogamy and capitalist wage labor without paying for it in other ways. Peggy in Mislaid, so overwrought by the bigotry of 1950s society, flees her ex-husband Lee and anything resembling a normal life to embrace extreme poverty living in a shack in the sticks. She succeeds in consummating her desire for queer sex only in her late 30s, thanks to a women’s studies lecturer who accosts her in a soybean field by “simultaneously kissing her and pushing her to the ground […] in a sort of combination tango step and wrestling move.”The walls around Peggy’s appetites are so strong, the forces of heteronormative expectation still wielding such a powerful influence, they have to be physically overcome by a lover whose intransigence is equal to her denial.

Bran, the beautiful but serially-abused central character in Avalon, becomes easy prey for Peter, a smug Harvard student, largely because he’s the first person to take an interest in her by properly articulating the appalling conditions she grew up in. He decides that she is an example of Homo sacer (“condemned to bare life under the disciplinary state of exception”), which Bran correctly interprets to mean: “I was fair game.” Peter provides Bran with the familiar dynamic of being taken advantage of, only in emotional and intellectual terms, stringing her along for months despite having a fiancée. His ability to offer a progressive political critique of almost any situation doesn’t prevent Peter from turning Bran into that most conventional of figures: the “other woman” in a marriage, whose triangulation allows him to fulfill the role of a perfect patriarchal hypocrite.

If Zink is correct about marriage—if it really is a sort of spiritual violence that attempts to blockade the heart from ever receiving love elsewhere—then the alternative that her novels seem to offer up, time and again, is to let the logic of desire itself dictate the shape of our lives. Working against the backdrop of so much prevailing ideology, with conservative institutions such as marriage a prime example, it’s little wonder the engine of her fiction is so often the state of romantic confusion that occurs when someone allows themself to be ruled over by desire, in all its ever-changing uncertainty, like “shadows on smoke.”