Nell Zink’s latest novel – her third in three years – comes packaged like an oversized box of Marlboro reds. There is no health warning, but perhaps there should be. The book opens with a disturbing scene in which 12-year-old Penny shares a “sweat lodge” with five old men and then wrestles with her naked half-brother, Matt, whom she has interrupted midcoitus.
Ten years later Matt has poached Penny’s lover, the polyamorous anarchist Jazz, for both consensual and nonconsensual acts of intercourse. These are just some of the scenes of grotesque (and occasionally gross) sexual intimacy scattered throughout Zink’s zany and compelling social satire, which lurches from one absurd situation to the next disturbing one with dizzying abandon.
Nicotine is, essentially, a coming-of-age tale. Penny's father, Norm, a shaman who uses drugs to "helps heal souls when bodies cannot be healed", has just died. It was Penny's job to administer to him in his dying hours. Her mother, Amalia, whom Norm rescued from an orphanage when she was a child and then married, and her half-brothers, Matt and Patrick, are too busy making money at their various (and variously unethical) pursuits.
Penny is hoping to inherit enough money to save her having to get a job. Having recently graduated from business college, she would prefer not to have to work for her fortune. Much to Penny’s shock and chagrin Norm was asset rich but cash poor. Instead of a lump sum she is gifted control of Norm’s childhood home in Jersey City, which, it turns out, has been taken over by squatters.
Instead of cleaning it up she falls in love with one of its residents, Rob, a tobacco-spitting, asexual anarchist. As Penny puts it in a text message, he is “redneck but *CUTE!!!*” She conceals her identity and is embraced by the residents. Her ethnic background – part Jewish, part Colombian-Kogi – will be an asset to their campaign for indigenous rights. (The logic, of course, is deliberately ironic.)
The title of Zink’s book is also the name of the squat that Penny infiltrates. Nicotine is a catch-all commune where anarchists attached to climate change, feminism and communism have been banded together – or, as they see it, ostracised – based on their unsavoury tobacco addiction. Even within the anarchist community smoking will turn you into a pariah.
Eventually, however, the residents decide to quit and move into another squat to detox, but when they return they find that Matt is trying to evict them. Thus ensues another scene of naked wrestling, involving large and small erections and a shotgun, resulting in a group of outcast anarchists on the run. Any sense of neat resolution falls away as Zink hurries towards a predictably messy, madcap ending.
Zink aims her satirical eye far and wide. The scenarios are imbued with irony: the middle-class comforts that the anarchists aspire to, facilitated by the emergency credit cards that their parents have given them; the competition between them to see who is more ethnic. (The rarity of Penny's Kogi blood earns her bonus points on the scale of "blackness", recalling the racial "passing" at the heart of Zink's 2015 book, Mislaid.)
The warring characters, meanwhile, offer Zink an opportunity to pillory both sides of a variety of moral, economic and political positions. At Norm’s funeral, for example, as a group of his devotees trip out around a bonfire, Amalia praises him as healer, while Penny sees Norm’s shamanism more pragmatically but with no less awe. “He never healed anything,” she says. “He helped people pass the time and forget. And that is sainthood. Dad was a fucking saint.”
The most brutal irony in Nicotine is that Matt, the novel's most despicable and debased character, is perhaps the one who has the most to offer the world. The mobile waste compactors he invents are "changing people's lives, increasing landfill capacity so we don't have to burn that shit and fill the air with dioxins until everyone gets terminal cancer . . ."
If Matt has to make money along the way, well and good. Money is, after all, “the foundation of material existence, at least until the revolution comes and sweeps it away”.
Like The Wallcreeper (2014) and Mislaid, Nicotine has so much plot that it can be hard to know which meandering diversions and distractions to invest in. The best approach is to forget about narrative shape or psychological realism and just enjoy the ride.
Nicotine is exhilarating and exhausting, socially savvy and sexually scandalising, and never, for a moment, anything less than entertaining. It is an important, funny book that also has a pretty sharp moral and social message at its heart. Whether you find it palatable is another matter.
Either way, you can be guaranteed that Zink probably doesn’t care if you take offence. As Penny says at one point: “It’s not my job to tell the story in a way that makes me look good.”
Sara Keating is an arts journalist
