FICTION IN REVIEW

1 6 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F Not many writers could extract humor from a hospice scene, but Nell Zink manages it. In her latest novel, Nicotine, Norm, an aged Jewish shaman and free thinker who’s seen many better days, is being o√ered high-dosage narcotics to ease the pain permanently – only the hospice personnel can’t make the o√er directly. Norm has to ask. As Zink explains, ‘‘The request would have been honored . But general anaesthesia isn’t a menu item, because the hospice is run like one of those brothels that are nominally strip clubs. The license a√ords no protection to the dancers, who must turn tricks as furtively and nervously as hospice sta√ dispensing painless deaths.’’ Norm happens to be a bit of a comedian, and the slanted exchanges between him and the hospice director are more fun than funereal. But Norm’s daughter, Penny, carries the rest of the narrative, as she goes to explore the dilapidated Jersey City brownstone where Norm’s parents once lived. Anarchistic squatters have taken over the place and renamed it Nicotine after establishing a non-smokeN i c o t i n e , by Nell Zink (Ecco, 304 pp., $26.99). 1 6 5 R free environment. One of the residents, a polymorphously seductive woman named Jazz, even grows her own tobacco on the premises . These are politically informed people who know how to work the system, from milking nonprofits to dumpster diving. The coopted catchphrases and shrewd knowingness make for a heady mix. When Penny explains herself to the squatters, for instance, she starts: ‘‘First o√, my mom was Kogi. This people from Colombia.’’ ‘‘I’ve heard of them,’’ Rob says. ‘‘On the mountaintop, with the gourds. They keep the universe going.’’ ‘‘Now they’re more into slash-and-burn cattle farming in national parks.’’ ‘‘What’s their deal?’’ Sorry asks. ‘‘They used to be the ultimate weirdo tribe,’’ Penny says. ‘‘Their whole lifestyle was chewing coca. That’s all they did. I mean munch it like goats, all day every day. Wandering around chewing coca leaves with builders’ lime until their molars were flat, smearing their spit on these gourds. But that was just the men, obviously. The women cooked and cleaned and got traded between totemic clans or something.’’ The whole novel reads that way: loose and whip-smart, casual but extremely informed, since Zink knows about everything from grass-roots activism to the hallucinogenic practices of South American tribes. Or her characters do, which amounts to the same thing. As Penny contemplates how to reclaim her family’s property , she falls in love with Rob, a bicycle reclamation activist who’s too nice to take advantage of a woman, and the sequence of events follows the will-he-won’t-he question. Other amorous entanglements , sexual and semi-innocent, include not just the other squatters but also Penny’s two older half-brothers and her mother. Given the winner-take-all narcissism of our species, with everyone out for something, the results are surprisingly tender. But what’s most noticeable is Zink’s voice, an oddity in this era of hipster clones. It’s blunt and sharp at the same time, a mix of high-low culture that registers in all octaves. The Wallcreeper, Zink’s first published novel, also features a semi-knowing naïf, a first-person narrator named Ti√any, stranded with her errant husband in Bern and also Berlin. The plot involves a lot of extramarital sex and casual career sabotage stoked by a discontent with 1 6 6 G A L E F Y things as they are. On the other hand are the consolations of philosophy. Here’s Ti√any in a bedroom scene with someone who’s not her husband: ‘‘I shifted back into neutral and once again accepted the need for negative capability in this world. We had loving, beautiful sex as soon as we could get ourselves to stop talking – loving and beautiful in the expressionist, patheticfallacy sense in which...