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Nell Zink
October 12, 2016 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm UTC+0
Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between Baby-Boomer idealism and Millennial pragmatism, between the have-nots and want-mores, in a riotous yet tender novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.
Recent business school graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life… by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi and her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic “healing center.” She’s never felt particularly close to her much older half-brothers from Norm’s previous marriage; one, wickedly charming and obscenely rich (but mostly just wicked), and one a photographer on a distant tropical island.
All that changes when her father dies and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming, and who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers’ rights’) possess the type of passion and fervor Penny feels she’s desperately lacking, and the other squatter houses in the neighborhood provide a sense of community she has never felt before. She soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in the political fervor and commitment of her fellow squatters.
As the Baker familys’ lives begin to converge around the fate of the house now called Nicotine, Penny grows ever bolder and more desperate to protect it and its residents until a fateful night when a reckless confrontation between her old family and her new one changes everything.
Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her writing has also appeared in n+1. Her debut novel, The Wallcreeper, was published in 2014. She lives near Berlin, Germany.