Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. How many people still angry and despondent over 2016 want to relive it through the eyes of a Green Party staffer? More critically, fiction set behind the scenes in Washington doesn’t feel all that compelling when everyone in the real Washington-from politicians to speechwriters to low-level staffers-has an Instagram account.Ī timely, ambitious, and uneven effort from an excellent contemporary writer.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. At the same time, it’s an open question how much people who are bombarded by news about Donald Trump all day, every day, want to see his name in a novel. When she writes about the last presidential election, she doesn’t create a character who looks a lot like Donald Trump she writes about Donald Trump. There’s something refreshing about Zink’s willingness to name names. Flora’s passion for the environment leads her to a position with Jill Stein’s campaign. After this turning point, the narrative focus begins to shift to Pam and Daniel’s daughter and widen to take in more of the political landscape. The bonds among this chosen family are beginning to strain when 9/11 happens.

Joe is guileless and incapable of self-analysis, which makes him both intensely lovable and totally eager to play the archetypal rock star. Pam and Daniel are both flawed and capable of recognizing their flaws. There is no shortage of fiction chronicling young people finding themselves through the punk scene on the Lower East Side, but Zink’s version of this coming-of-age tale is distinctive because her superpower as an author is crafting weirdos and misfits without being excessively charmed by her creations. The threesome remains an odd but fully functional unit even after Daniel and Pam start having sex and fall in love, even after Pam has a baby, even after Joe becomes an indie darling.

Daniel is as obsessed with obscure music as Pam and Joe, but he's more interested in producing than playing. Her new friend waits tables at a diner and plays bass. She's one-half of a truly terrible band when she meets Joe. In 1986, when life at home in the suburbs becomes too stifling, Pam gets on a bus and heads for New York. The author of Nicotine (2016) and Mislaid (2015) takes readers from CBGB to Washington, D.C.

Private novelist nell zink