Private novelist nell zink5/19/2023 ![]() Destruction seems to be happening all by itself. I'm not sure if "the madness of the current moment" Martin refers to is the madness of the Covid-19. Doxology may prove to be a transitional book in her career, like, say, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the work of a committed spitballer creeping toward a more sober reckoning with the world, then bailing out when things get too real. ![]() It may be the case that her strengths as a writer are fundamentally those of the disrupter and the caricaturist rather than the nuanced social chronicler, but the madness of the current moment calls as much for disruption as it does for breadth and grace. Martin precisely identifies what Doxology means to Zink's career development: In her latest novel, Zink has new plans for which her heroines are ill-equipped. Zink’s female characters are better at reading the room than finding a comfort zone. As Martin points out, after his death, the novel downshifts as Zink subjects her heroine to a marriage plot as the 2016 election approaches. His fame was such a lark he could only come to a bad end, which he does. ![]() Joe's rise to rock stardom struck me as implausible, even by loose standards of the day. Martin identifies where the novel goes wrong: the death of Joe Harris, a 1990s rock star. ![]() Doxology is a more considered work, so its turning more explicit. ![]() Like Doxology, it was better in the upward slope of premise than the downward slope of resolution. ![]()
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