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The American writer Nell Zink has made her name with a series of mostly short, sparky novels since her excellent debut The Wallcreeper a decade ago. Her books are energetic and populated with characters whose individualism borders on eccentricity: a flamenco-dancing adoptee here, an anarchist squatter there.
At first, Sister Europe seems like more of the same. The setting is Zink’s adopted home of Berlin, where in February 2023 a motley group — undercover cop, trans teen, prince and more — gather at a hotel for a literary awards ceremony. The recipient is an Arab writer named Masud, who now lives in Norway, though the story is really about those around him.
Central to the story is Masud’s old friend Demian, an art and architecture critic, and his 15-year-old daughter Nicole; much of the story follows their experiences on the night. And everything is delivered with a cynicism — “Life is all about raising expectations and seeing them crushed. Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone” — which no character escapes.
Masud gets the cynical treatment — his writing suffers from “a grating and persistent anti-Black racism” — as does Demian, who “excused it, on grounds that it would be hard for an anti-Black racist to do much damage in Norway, where anti-Muslim racism was a deadly threat”. Teenager Nicole, who is trans, earns a little more authorial generosity. When we meet her, she’s out on the streets posing as a sex worker, hoping to use the simple appetites of heterosexual men as a guide to whether she really is beautiful — which seems to be less poking fun at her naivety than reflecting her innocence.
The engine for the plot, such as it is, is the awards ceremony, where Zink winds her characters up and sets them off. But she has wound them too tightly, and they skitter across the pages in a fury of jumpy dialogue that rarely settles on a single storyline. Other characters come aboard: the Arab prince Radi (“Do you have a day job, or is it just prince stuff?” one attendee asks him); Klaus, an undercover cop who’s trailing Nicole as he thinks she really is a sex worker; friends and hangers-on like Livia, Avianca, and a dog named Fisti.
With a few exceptions, most scenes in the book consist of multi-person conversations: people sit or stand and talk and talk, wittily and breezily. (For variety, at one point they go on a night-time trek to Burger King.) These protracted scenes lack focus, resulting in whole sections that feel both antic and static.
There are moments of relief, usually where one or two characters are in the foreground, such as a toe-curling seduction scene with Radi and Nicole (“I’ve heard there are people who call me ‘Radi the Impaler’”). And Masud’s award scene is a comic highlight, as the advance speeches drag on beyond their allotted length, and then, ominously, clad in his “trademark vermilion turtleneck with chocolate-brown corduroys”, Masud “walked to the podium, holding a six-hundred-page novel”.
In fact, in its vim and vigour, Sister Europe has the characteristics of a big, idiosyncratic 600-page novel, except for the length, and that is where its problem lies. The book is so compressed that there’s no breathing space, none of the connective tissue of plot and background that we need to know the characters better. It skips along the surface of things beautifully; but adding more surface, and then more, and then more again, is no substitute for stopping and thinking.
Sister Europe by Nell Zink Viking £14.99/Knopf $28 208 pages
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