Review by New York Times Review
EARLY IN "The Wallcreeper," Nell Zink's heady and rambunctious debut novel, the narrator, Tiffany, tells her husband that she's spending her leisure time "breeding and feeding." It's an inside joke - Stephen, her husband, loves birding, and "breeding and feeding" is how he describes the avian lifestyle, "making them sound like sex-obsessed gluttons (that is, human beings)." Tiffany may be joking, but she's not lying. She's married Stephen, a "post-punk" pharmaceutical researcher, after a three-week courtship, and has followed him - or his paycheck - from Philadelphia to Switzerland, where she spends her time loafing around, shopping and canoodling with an assortment of ill-chosen paramours. She also occasionally accompanies Stephen on birding vacations. They're birding, in fact, when the book opens with its snappy first line: "I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock and occasioned the miscarriage." This accident is caused by a bird, a wallcreeper to be specific, and Stephen is over the moon about the sighting. He's far more moved by it than he is worried about Tiffany. "You should see its wings," he tells his bleeding wife. "For me it's a lifer. It's like the most wonderful bird." It seems pertinent to note, before I go on, that this book's origins involve another notable birder, the novelist Jonathan Franzen. Zink, who wrote a post-punk fanzine in the 1990s, spent the last decade writing "impromptus" for friends - "long involved things like Viennese-style operettas and entire novels just to illustrate points in conversation." Through her environmental activism she met and befriended Franzen, who chastised her for writing, always, to an audience of one. Zink responded with the first draft of this novel as an impromptu for him; he even makes a cameo, if you're paying close attention. And you have to pay attention. "The Wallcreeper" moves at breakneck speed - whole plot points and geographical relocations often happen in a clause, as in that opening miscarriage. The minute you think you have a foothold, Tiffany has suddenly changed apartments, moved to Berlin or (possibly) gotten pregnant again. Pay attention, and you'll catch all of Zink's brilliant one-liners. After Stephen does several unprintable things to her body, Tiffany says, "He was uninhibited, as in inconsiderate." When Stephen meets a hot blond activist at a club, Tiffany notes that she wears a "longish dress over pants, as if she were doing her Western best to conform with the dress code of Yemen." When she has a dalliance with Elvis the Montenegrin and they have "loving, beautiful sex," she clarifies that she means "loving and beautiful in the expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was loving and beautiful even if it was full of hamsters ready to kill each other on sight, but only when they're awake." Zink is at her maddest and most hilarious on the subject of sex. These scenes are so raunchy and obscene, there's virtually nothing I can quote as an example. Let's just say that, at moments, she gives Nicholson Baker a run for his money. SHE'S DEEPLY IRREVERENT, too. What's conventionally sacrosanct is quickly dispensed with. "Marriage isn't a sacrament," Tiffany says; "it's just a bunch of forms to fill out." Pregnancy is "one of those things that happen when newly-weds get drunk." In this inverted emotional landscape, that opening miscarriage is pretty forgettable, but a wallcreeper can rock your world. Stephen takes the bird home. They name him Rudolf Durruti - "Rudolf" for Rudolf Hess, because the wallcreeper has the same coloring as the Nazi flag, and "Durruti" for the anarcho-communist Buenaventura Durruti, just to even the score. They keep him as a pet until he begins to molt and crave a mate, at which point they set him free. But nature isn't kind, and poor Rudi gets disemboweled by a sparrow hawk right in front of the couple. Afterward, Stephen becomes withdrawn. "Saving one single wild thing was more than I could manage," he says. "But then I remember that you know how to look out for yourself and I feel better." Tiffany doesn't try to comfort or console; that's never been her bag. Instead, she does a little linguistic algebra and feels extreme delight. In effect, he's called her a wild thing. Rudi wants to be wild; Tiff wants to be wild; wildness has great allure. But what, in Zink's world, is the reason for that? It makes breeding and feeding more complicated, after all, and it kills their bird. This is an environmental novel, if a totally surprising one. It contains none of the earnestness we might expect from the genre - there are very few descriptions of pristine forests or lyrical passages about nature. Instead Zink, through the misadventures of Tiffany, satirizes our tendency toward mindless consumption, the way we not only plunder resources in an effort to breed and feed but allow ourselves (especially if we are female) to be similarly plundered: physically, emotionally, spiritually, creatively. It's a powerful message, made more powerful by its completely bananas delivery-system. Eventually, Tiffany - at the urging of a radical priest - commits an act of eco-terrorism. She's physically transformed by the hard labor of the task: "I was looking muscular and outdoorsy and more like a birdwatcher's dream date ... than ever before." But the act has deeper implications. The Tiffany who soothed herself with food, shopping and sex begins to look inward. Spiritually and intellectually, she abandons domestication and goes feral. "Feral," in fact, is a good adjective for Zink's book, which bucks easy summary with such force it feels like a fool's errand to try corralling it for a review. In its pace, humor, themes, plot and style, the novel is so untamed that it comments on the very idea of tameness. Yet even readers (like me) who love Zink's agenda, her irreverence, how she flips the bird at convention every chance she gets, are likely to feel that her fiction loses steam when she declaims about eco-activism. The passages about European environmental groups, government programs and methods of protest are less universal and more like amusement for insiders - more like the impromptu they started as, in other words. But it's safe to assume that Zink didn't set out to write a warm and fuzzy novel, literature as an opiate for "the intellectually underprivileged" - not with all her nods to Marxist theory and various anarchists. Her novel defiantly resists classification as a modern commodity, something easily consumed and disposed of. Wake up, this book says: in its plot lines, in its humor, in its philosophical underpinnings and political agenda. You snooze and we all lose. Zink's work may be, at times, cerebral and a little distancing, but its vitality and purpose are invigorating. In that way, "The Wallcreeper" embodies the landscapes and creatures Tiffany ultimately aims to save. I'll pay it the highest compliment it knows - this book is a wild thing. Zink satirizes mindless consumption, how we plunder and let ourselves be plundered. ROBIN ROMM is the author of "The Mother Garden" and "The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 5, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Zink's debut novel is a weird, funny, sad, and sharp story of growing up. Opening with a car accident in which young married couple Tiffany and Stephen hit a wallcreeper (a bird that Stephen, a fanatical birder, adopts as a pet and names Rudolf), causing Tiffany to miscarry, the bulk of the novel follows the couple's push-and-pull years in Europe. Stephen, a stubborn and secretive pharmaceutical researcher stationed in Berne, makes enough money to support both of them; and Tiffany, who was bored at her last real job as a secretary, makes no bones about not wanting to work. In many ways, Tiffany and Stephen are the perfect match: they are both capricious, unfaithful (Stephen even sleeps with Tiffany's "bikini barista" sister, with Tiffany's blessing), and unsure of themselves. Their marriage is really just a loose agreement, and they spend most of the story drifting around each other: Stephen suffers an inner crisis and moves to Albania to study birds, while Tiffany, who's never had to work hard, passes her days alone on the Elbe tearing down levees to flood a forest in need of water. "I couldn't come up with a step I'd taken in life for my own sake," she says. Written in short, fragmentary sections, Zink masterfully captures the slippery nature of human intimacy, the ways in which relationships both thrive on emotional gray areas and jump from one black-and-white area to another (jealousy and indifference; blame and forgiveness; listlessness and wonder). This is the introduction of an exciting new voice. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Zink's cerebral, fast-paced first novel chronicles a young woman's life in Europe after marrying a man she's known for three weeks. Following her husband, Stephen, from Philadelphia to Bern, Switzerland, for his research and development job at a medical device firm, Tiffany explains, "We didn't talk much about what we were doing. We had a deal." They're both whip-smart, but strangers, and the "deal" for Tiffany in this dark, philosophical sex comedy goes sour from the word go. After Stephen hits a bird with the car, swerves and crashes into a large rock, Tiffany miscarries, and he worries more about capturing the birdthe wallcreeper of the titlethan helping her; weeks later, he forces her into anal sex. "I gasped for air, dreading the moment when he would pull out, and thought, Girls are lame." She half-jokes, "I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices?" but notes, "My sense of depending on Stephen for my happiness had evaporated." He does offer stability, though, so she stays married since she'd rather not work and has no degree or experience to bank on. They have affairs openly, and after his career goes sideways (drugs, heavy birding), their love survives, mostly as a hypnotic ideal. Moving to Germany, they live apart and become environmental activists, navigating complex public policy on natural resourcesa subject Zink mines for humor and a sociopolitical counterpoint to Tiffany's personal chaosthen reunite for a harrowing trek by donkey through Albania. Tiffany agrees she's no feminist and doesn't argue when a friend quips about her life's trajectory, "My love, you have the attention span of a fish." But at a remove from the uproarious, inventive and infinitely quotable sentences, Tiffany's lonely existence careens from sex toward self-knowledge as death breezes by late in the book. A brief yet masterful novel of epic breadth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
