Staff Picks: Free Verse, Farewells, and Fist City
by The Paris Review
Aug 02, 2019
4 minutes
Nell Zink’s is the first truly great novel to tackle the 2016 election. I’ve been a fan of Zink’s work since , but in this new novel, she’s sharper and slyer than ever before. At times, it almost feels like she’s winking at Jonathan Franzen’s , with its indie-rock musician character and D.C. environmentalist subplot. But Zink turns everything on its head: the musician isn’t sexy but an idiot savant; the worldly D.C. operative isn’t greedy but instead trying to defeat Trump; the environmentalists’ idealism rapidly turns self-serving. And no one can write a one-liner like Zink: New York, for instance, is “a city devoted to making the labor theory of value
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