It was a bit uncanny to read Nell Zink’s new novel, “Doxology,” in the wake of the suicide this month of David Berman, the beloved singer and songwriter best known for his work with Silver Jews, his indie-rock band.
A similar type of outside-the-box musician, named Joe Harris, dies too young (heroin) in “Doxology.” Berman and Harris are different in many ways. But they share a surreal sense of humor. Zink shows us Harris onstage at one point, “rocking out to his own conception of beauty, alone and weird.” Berman and Harris also share a restless sort of talent that can lead artists to become more influential dead than alive.
“Doxology” isn’t fundamentally a music novel. It has many other things on its mind, including a subversive history of American politics from Operation Desert Shield through the start of the Trump presidency, and it’s superb. In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, it’s the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss.
“Doxology” displays two generations of an American family. Pamela and Daniel are semi-clueless young people who move individually to New York City in the late 1980s. They might have dropped sideways, like bookmarks, out of a Jonathan Lethem novel. He is fleeing college life after graduation; she is just fleeing. They meet, marry, struggle financially and play in small anti-bands, sometimes with Harris before he becomes famous. Pamela’s musical motto is: “If you gotta suck, suck loud.”
They’re ’80s hipsters, in other words, a genus with which Zink is intimate. Here’s a sample of this writer’s sociological acumen — her ability, like Tom Wolfe by way of Lorrie Moore, to cram observation into a tight space:
“The ’80s hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the ‘hipster’ in the new century. He wasn’t a ’50s hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture,” she writes. “Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motor sports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang.”
Zink adds, as a flourish: “An ’80s hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood.” She writes: “His presence drove rents down.” Also: “The ’80s hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.”
If you care about this sort of thing, Zink writes about music as if she were a cluster of the best American rock critics (Ellen Willis, Ann Powers, Jessica Hopper and Amanda Petrusich, let’s say) crushed together under a single byline. This novel is replete with erudite signifiers that drop all over the place, like a toddler eating a pint of blueberries: Robert Christgau jokes, nods to the “Casio-core” sound, paeans to the righteous punk glory of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi.
One band sounds “like lawn mowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos.” When Pamela plays guitar, “her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens.” (...)
Post-sensitive is not a bad description of Zink’s Weltanschauung. Her women tend to be the sort of people for whom, as the old joke has it, there was no Santa at 6, no stork at 9 and no God at 12. (...)
Her previous novels include “The Wallcreeper,” “Mislaid” and “Nicotine,” and I’ve admired many aspects of each of them. “Doxology” puts her on a new level as a novelist, however. This book is more ambitious and expansive and sensitive than her earlier work. She lays her heart on the line in a way she hasn’t before.
by Dwight Garner, NY Times | Read more:
A similar type of outside-the-box musician, named Joe Harris, dies too young (heroin) in “Doxology.” Berman and Harris are different in many ways. But they share a surreal sense of humor. Zink shows us Harris onstage at one point, “rocking out to his own conception of beauty, alone and weird.” Berman and Harris also share a restless sort of talent that can lead artists to become more influential dead than alive.
“Doxology” isn’t fundamentally a music novel. It has many other things on its mind, including a subversive history of American politics from Operation Desert Shield through the start of the Trump presidency, and it’s superb. In terms of its author’s ability to throw dart after dart after dart into the center of your media-warped mind and soul, it’s the novel of the summer and possibly the year. It’s a ragged chunk of ecstatic cerebral-satirical intellection. It’s bliss.“Doxology” displays two generations of an American family. Pamela and Daniel are semi-clueless young people who move individually to New York City in the late 1980s. They might have dropped sideways, like bookmarks, out of a Jonathan Lethem novel. He is fleeing college life after graduation; she is just fleeing. They meet, marry, struggle financially and play in small anti-bands, sometimes with Harris before he becomes famous. Pamela’s musical motto is: “If you gotta suck, suck loud.”
They’re ’80s hipsters, in other words, a genus with which Zink is intimate. Here’s a sample of this writer’s sociological acumen — her ability, like Tom Wolfe by way of Lorrie Moore, to cram observation into a tight space:
“The ’80s hipster bore no resemblance to the bearded and effeminate cottage industrialist who came to prominence as the ‘hipster’ in the new century. He wasn’t a ’50s hipster either. He knew nothing of heroin or the willful appropriation of black culture,” she writes. “Having spent four years at the foot of the ivory tower, picking up crumbs of obsolete theory, he descended to face once again the world of open-wheel motor sports and Jell-O salads from whence he sprang.”
Zink adds, as a flourish: “An ’80s hipster couldn’t gentrify a neighborhood.” She writes: “His presence drove rents down.” Also: “The ’80s hipster could get served a beer in the Ozarks.”
If you care about this sort of thing, Zink writes about music as if she were a cluster of the best American rock critics (Ellen Willis, Ann Powers, Jessica Hopper and Amanda Petrusich, let’s say) crushed together under a single byline. This novel is replete with erudite signifiers that drop all over the place, like a toddler eating a pint of blueberries: Robert Christgau jokes, nods to the “Casio-core” sound, paeans to the righteous punk glory of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi.
One band sounds “like lawn mowers ridden by nymphets playing banjos.” When Pamela plays guitar, “her fingers move like it’s freezing out and she lost her mittens.” (...)
Post-sensitive is not a bad description of Zink’s Weltanschauung. Her women tend to be the sort of people for whom, as the old joke has it, there was no Santa at 6, no stork at 9 and no God at 12. (...)
Her previous novels include “The Wallcreeper,” “Mislaid” and “Nicotine,” and I’ve admired many aspects of each of them. “Doxology” puts her on a new level as a novelist, however. This book is more ambitious and expansive and sensitive than her earlier work. She lays her heart on the line in a way she hasn’t before.
by Dwight Garner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sonny Figueroa
