Nell Zink is a weird novelist. Not “zany” or “quirky” or any of those other words used to indicate affected oddness: weird. In any other novel, if the heroine was living as an indentured topiarist under the control of a southern California biker family, you would expect a climactic confrontation between our heroine and said bikers. With Zink, the only sure thing is that your expectations are going to be foiled.
Avalon is a coming-of-age novel, following Bran from about the age of ten to her late teens. The plants she works with “lived and died in long rows, blissfully insensate cannon fodder in the never-ending war between supply and demand”. Bran becomes sensate cannon fodder in that same war.
Her employers — called the Hendersons — are also her foster family, so she goes to school by day and works for their black market garden centre in the evenings. She is here because no one else will have her. First her father deserts her mother while Bran is still a baby and moves to Australia. “His life’s dream,” writes Bran, drily, was to “have different children, pay us nothing, and ignore us”.
Her mother takes up with one of the Hendersons, but later flits to a Buddhist retreat, leaving Bran behind. The Hendersons are happy to keep her. “From their perspective, my mother offered me to them in payment for her freedom,” explains Bran. Her maternal grandparents, meanwhile, offer twenty dollar bills and nothing more. When they offer “support”, Bran understands they mean the moral, not the material kind.
This makes Bran a very different character from Holden in The Catcher in the Rye or Esther in The Bell Jar, the classic literary teenagers. Salinger and Plath wrote about characters with resources: their lassitude was a rebellion. Bran’s lassitude is a consequence of having no options at all. “My work was the only survival strategy that I — an innocent child — happened to know.”
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Her best friend, a boy called Jay, is a survival strategy too. “Not that having a friend was quite enough to save me. But it helped.” Jay is another misfit, but a misfit by virtue of being an adoptee and of his sexuality (Jay wears flamenco boots to school, and it’s a sign of Bran’s unworldliness that she doesn’t take this as a clear tell that her new friend is gay). Through him, Bran becomes part of a clique centred on the school magazine.
Avalon observes beautifully the shifting terrain of teenage intimacy: its intensity and its fragility. The others go to college. Bran does not. Her friendships strain and fade. But through Jay she meets his college friend Peter, a magnificently pretentious young man who likes comparing Bran’s life to a Kafka novel, and who might — perhaps — be the saviour she’s waiting for.
If Avalon is “about” anything, it’s that craving for salvation, for a place of purity and healing like the title. Bran’s mother looks for it in mysticism, her father looks for it in Australia, the Hendersons look for it in their criminal Eden.
Bran is barely able to look for it at all. The psychological hold of the Hendersons over her is agonisingly well drawn. Near the end, she wonders: “Who ever said being was supposed to be fun?” Avalon says that: it’s a hilarious, heartbreaking and — of course — extremely weird novel.
Avalon by Nell Zink
Bloomsbury £14.99 pp224
