Compact and spiky ... That Zink has now written a novel long on discourse and short on incident should not be viewed as a capitulation but as its opposite: a defiant gesture delivered with a punk-rock sneer ... Skillful ... May turn off readers allergic to disagreeable characters. Certainly, the real world is shoveling enough of those at us. Yet for all the novel’s outrageous dialogue and tense interactions, it’s the work of an author with a fiercely original and empathetic voice. One leaves the book wanting more of it.
To stay out late in Zink’s world, loitering, is a pleasure. If you don’t know what her writing sounds like, the only word for it is Zinkish. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality — a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. If this doesn’t happen to be among her finest novels, well, it has strong consolations ... A drawback of this short novel is that it introduces too many characters; none quite sink in. Sister Europe lacks the air of inevitability that a good novel has. It also lacks a sense of drama, not that the gifted Zink does not try to inject some ... Bring your black turtleneck; you may briefly feel you are in an absurdist Wallace Shawn play.
The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny: Zink’s dialogue reads like our best plays. Entertaining banter could be this book’s largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which are so ambitious and ethically interested that they make it clear that Zink is one of our most important contemporary writers ... The ever-shifting flow of social and sexual power between the characters is nerve-racking and tantalising: there are no saints and no demons ... Zink is one of our most ambitious and explicitly political writers ... While this is a novel of ideas, the narrative is never cold or cerebral. It’s beautifully felt, and emotionally open-handed. I wanted love and joy for each of the 13 main characters, which the book (surprisingly!) delivers.
An extraordinary encapsulation of the empty, performative morality that pervades our current era and an exasperating and frequently confounding story that has little to say about that world. Whether or not its contemporary relevance will keep you reading is likely to hinge on your tolerance for the kind of contemptuous men whom Zink portrays with an impressive authenticity. These characters are repeatedly so blithely stupid or offensive that I wanted to scream, not because I was scandalized by their statements or actions, but because I was bored by their tiresome, hackneyed, entitled ignorance ... While fiction does not need to teach a lesson or even make a point, satire — which presumably this novel is aiming for — is more effective leavened with humor or drama, both of which are in short supply here.
Shaped in the timeless way of a Wodehousian comedy of errors ... This sly, sprightly novel provides a distraction from the news while the news is all over it.
While the novel has its bright moments and features Zink’s always flowing and often witty prose, the absence of real incident and the only vaguely appealing cast make reading it more of an effort than its barely 200 pages would suggest ... One leaves Sister Europe with a sense of disappointment over how much more, in the hands of a writer of Zink’s gifts, it could have been.
Delightfully surprising lines ... Zink’s narration is cool, her humour is dry and her dialogue is convincing. But the promise of her characters’ quirkiness doesn’t in the end add up to much. Despite its early intrigue, the story feels disappointingly quiet by the end.
The engine for the plot, such as it is, is the awards ceremony, where Zink winds her characters up and sets them off. But she has wound them too tightly, and they skitter across the pages in a fury of jumpy dialogue that rarely settles on a single storyline ... Protracted scenes lack focus, resulting in whole sections that feel both antic and static ... In fact, in its vim and vigour, Sister Europe has the characteristics of a big, idiosyncratic 600-page novel, except for the length, and that is where its problem lies. The book is so compressed that there’s no breathing space, none of the connective tissue of plot and background that we need to know the characters better. It skips along the surface of things beautifully; but adding more surface, and then more, and then more again, is no substitute for stopping and thinking.
Witty ... Zink cleverly and expertly combines hilarious scenes at the awards ceremony and the seven-course dinner with razor-sharp observations on culture, Americans in Europe, literature in the Middle East, sexuality, and the heavy hand of history.
