NICOTINE by Nell Zink — Reviewed by Stella

There are still plenty of gems in our fiction sale. It’s a great opportunity to discover a new author, to delve into a different genre, and improve your reading addiction. If you haven’t read Nell Zink, you can choose: Doxology or Nicotine. Both are excellent. If you like music the former, but for me the latter is still my favourite. Zink’s writing, with its overtones and undertones (plenty of sly digs at cultural norms and hilarious metaphors about relationships), is clever and exhilarating. In Nicotine she explores family and relationships in her own surprising way. Enter Penny, the unemployed business school graduate, daughter of Norm, the Jewish shaman who is famous for his healing clinics and extreme spiritualism, and Amalia, a Kogi, the young second wife rescued from the poverty of South America, who has become a very successful corporate banker. With parents like this, you know from the beginning that Penny carries some baggage. When her aged father dies, Penny is distraught and is left with more questions than answers about her family. Needing distraction, her family decides that she needs something to do. They send her to rescue her grandparents’ long-abandoned home in a dodgy suburb of New Jersey. We enter Nicotine; — the home of squatter activists whose common cause is the right to smoke. Penny is intrigued by the squatters and attracted to Rob, the very good-looking bicycle mechanic. Rather than throw them out of the house, she becomes part of the group, developing relationships with the home dwellers that will change not only her life, but theirs too. Penny, despite her seeming uselessness, becomes the catalyst for change for all, with many hilarious machinations and sly digs at social conformity on all sides along the way. Zink puts her characters through the paces, never letting up on them, (nor giving up), and plays with societal concepts of capitalism, pragmatism and spirituality. Zink is a ‘naughty’ writer — toying with her reader and her characters, constantly making fun of both in a very appealing and clever way. If you like to look at life a bit sideways then you’ll enjoy her style, playfulness and reflections on people — their gullibility, as well as their backbone.