I like almost everything about Nell Zink’s comic novels and the merry chaos they bring to a rather static American book scene. I like their ridiculously overelaborate storylines and I like their willingness to end happily. I like Ms. Zink’s habit of direct address ... I like that the books are actually funny. Her customary lunacy is on display again in Avalon ... A dab of nonsense is the crucial component that keeps the discussions lively and entertaining ... Having set down so much praise, it feels churlish to complain about Avalon. But as my toddler says whenever I present him with a thoughtfully prepared meal, this isn’t my favorite ... The decision to deliver the novel from Brandy’s point of view doesn’t show Ms. Zink in her best light—the first-person voice is paradoxically more buttoned-up than her omniscient third-person narratives. And there’s a comparative shortage of comic set pieces here, as well as a needlessly fractured ending. But despite its seeming hastiness, its overall underdone quality, Avalon contains delights.
With Avalon, it’s as though Zink glanced at the mundane little formula that recurs throughout her press clippings and filched it for a plot ... Near the end of the book, the possibility of a terrible plot twist arises — the kind that rests on a preposterous coincidence. Zink dangles the twist long enough to make a reader squirm and then — made you look! — darts in another direction. There’s no fudging the rules in Avalon, which is the effulgent and clever sort of novel that replicates the experience of learning a new game: You enter its world voluntarily and add your reading effort to Zink’s writing effort with the idea that the sum of these energies will create a zone of mirth and meaning. What fun.
Nell Zink has honed a talent for prose that's assertive, even breezy in the face of ostensibly sad subjects ... So it's fitting in a way that her latest, Avalon, is a kind of modern fairy tale ... Loosely plotted and chatty ... Zink lovingly lampoons the way that teenagers bumble toward identity and character ... What little narrative momentum that "Avalon" achieves — Zink is best for readers who don't mind a lot of digression in their novels — lies in finding out whether Bran will get her happy ending ... A comparative literature major with curly black hair, Peter is almost comically erudite for his age ... But it's easy to forgive Zink this flight of fancy in a book that's so fun to read. And you don't have to believe a fairy tale to enjoy it.
Zink writes, in places, with almost cinematic vividness, and follows Bran’s evolution with an impressive commitment to realizing her experiences on the page. Yet I struggled with what seemed to be willful eccentricity in the setup: much about Bran’s circumstances felt artificial, even as the novel proceeds so carefully from its premises ... Zink...is unwilling to construct an elaborate plot for the purposes of readerly satisfaction—surely a laudable resistance ... But Bran’s ungrounded meandering is at the heart of the novel...and it’s no wonder that the novel reflects that aimlessness. Zink’s book is ambitious in its refusal to accede to recognizable ambitions; but once again, for this reader, the question of what’s at stake resoundingly recurs. While Avalon is vivid and thorough—persistent, even, in its whimsy—it ultimately has little discernible emotional logic, leaving us able to recount what happens but unable to account for why.
The ending of the novel is Zink at her best: clever and biting, and refreshingly unforced. Unfortunately, it’s one of the only parts of the book that works well ... Love — especially young love — doesn’t need a reason, of course, but the romance between these characters feels especially half-baked. Zink’s supporting cast of characters fare no better. The members of Bran and Jay’s literary magazine friend group aren’t given much to do; they essentially act as foils for the main characters ... On the positive side, the writing in the novel is mostly excellent, which is no surprise; Zink has a gift for crafting elegant sentences that reward rereading ... Strong passages aside, Zink seems to be operating at a remove here, examining young love like a scientist looking at a specimen, and the novel never really fully jells because of it. It’s a book that doesn’t seem to want to be known, like a neurotic cat that skitters away if you look at it too long — not a bad novel by any means, just not up to Zink’s usual high standards.
If you are partial to the pedantic musings of precocious English majors and the stuttering inertia of young people emerging from sad and loveless childhoods, you might really like Nell Zink’s new novel, Avalon ... Zink is a brilliant creator of character, setting and, for lack of a better word, vibe, and there is much pleasure to be found in the way she gets so many things so precisely right in this novel ... It’s well-observed, archly funny and, unfortunately, a bit bland as a whole ... While Zink has lots to say about class, art, aesthetics and growing up, the story is nearly nonexistent.
Whether your first Zink novel is your last depends on your taste and also on which novel you happen to pick up. And while Avalon’s scope might feel smaller than the purview of her previous books, it turns out to be incredibly pleasing — if sometimes also baffling — to see a writer this intelligent keep the focus of her gaze this tight ... Zink’s confidence and authority as a writer are evident from Avalon’s killer first sentences ... The book continues at this clip, this register of absurdity, never stopping to answer any questions you might have about the weight of its details or events ... the sentences zip through your brain, crackling with confidence and intelligence, daring you to wonder about such basic and uninteresting ideas ... I felt, in moments, about Avalon the way Bran feels about Peter: I could never quite tell whether it was laughing at me or welcoming me in on the joke. Was I really reading a whole book about Bran’s misbegotten pursuit? What lived beneath or alongside the humor? And why wasn’t Zink working harder to give more of those layers to me? ... There’s often a point in a Zink novel when the pleasure of the zany zip begins to wane; when you suspect it’s more joke than active engagement with the ideas it promised at the outset; when the thrilling conceits start to feel like a bait-and-switch...In the case of Avalon, the reach feels less ambitious, almost ahistorical. There’s hardly a cellphone in sight, and beyond the initial strangeness and devastation of Bran’s origins lies a pretty straightforward coming of age. But this might also be what makes it work. If, instead of being stranded in our present moment, I was on an island somewhere between Arthurian legend and the California coast, why not stay another page? ... There are also long stretches of satisfying narrative, of humanity and pain ... For most of the book, the farce felt too far from Earth for Zink to land it. I kept reading though — not only because I was contractually obligated, but because, like Bran with Peter, I couldn’t seem to extricate myself. And then something happened in the last third: The book surprised me. Something landed. The flight might be longer, floatier and more manic than some might want from fiction, but it ended up, for me, feeling like art.
Avalon rekindles much of what made The Wallcreeper a standout. Zink is consciously critiquing patriarchal society. The story is succinct and fast paced. The wry narrative voice is clear and enjoyable to read. Avalon is much more compact than some of the more sprawling narratives Zink has written in recent years. The novel finds a rhythm in that quick pacing, and in the structure balances on a fine line between hitting predictable beats and offering up unexpected plot pointsc ... Zink has composed another successful foray into a critique of the patriarchy relying on her distinctive voice and style to carry the novel.
Zink is both a very satisfying and a frustrating writer. Her plots are shapeless but oddly propulsive. Her narrative style is a tissue of quips that strays into glibness, even in her best work ... Zink likes to situate her characters within subcultures ... The great flaw in Avalon’s conception is that Zink tries to work this trick with the lowlife world of the Hendersons, but without the intimacy or the love. She has nothing but contempt for these characters, and they remain vague and one-dimensional ... It’s still a pleasure, and will give you more that’s genuinely new than 99% of books to be published this year.
... restless ... an acid take on friendship, family and young love that when it isn’t squeezing your heart is doing its best to enrage you ... Zink is a fearless satirist ... Even when she has to stretch to do so, Zink connects with her targets ... Life steams ahead whether a person wants it to or not, and the mystery at work in Avalon is whether Bran is paranoid enough to realize that. Zink answers that question with her usual cunning, and it’s no spoiler to note that the final page of the novel will send readers scrambling back to its first.
... a lighthearted Bildungsroman that is less noteworthy for its somewhat grab-bag plot than it is as an opportunity for Zink to display her gift for language, humor and refreshingly eccentric perspective on contemporary American culture ... Zink sends her plot spinning off in multifarious directions, and considering that the novel barely tops 200 pages, that’s one of its shortcomings ... She is such an engaging character that bobbing along on the stream of consciousness inside her head helps to make up for most of the novel’s flaws. While Avalon isn’t likely to leave much of a lasting impression, it’s pleasant enough while it lasts.
A characteristically witty bildungsroman ... Even more impactful than the intellectual ballistics is the tortured romance story. The style is all Zink’s own, and she’s as brilliant as ever here.
