A Portrait of the Artist Who Never Makes Art
We encounter Bran, the narrator of Nell Zink’s new novel, Avalon, just as she leaves a party where something pivotal and distressing has happened to her. We know that it is pivotal because we immediately cut back in time to Bran’s childhood, and much of the novel becomes an inexorable march toward that fateful night. We also have some warning that the account we are about to hear is a fragile memory: “I have trouble recounting my childhood in chronological order. It appears in fragments, like a cored and sectioned apple. Put it back together, and the interior disappears.” I’m always a little wary when a book has a thesis statement right at the top that seems pinned in place to explain some infirmity in the execution.
What follows is an annoyingly twee novel—Dickens by way of Jodi Picoult—in which Bran is abandoned by her mother, who goes on to become a Buddhist nun of sorts and
