A review by chillcox15
Doxology by Nell Zink

3.0

3.5 stars. Reading Doxology, a certain undercurrent to Zink's artistic process has become clear. She's a parodist, but one whose targets are so wide and miasmic in scope that it's hard to see the works as parodies at all. Mislaid, her best work yet, works as a regular ol' entry into the campus novel genre (albeit a particularly hilarious, insightful one), but it also, at an askance glance, works as a rip on some of the foremost practitioners of the genre: the late modernist ilk of Roth and Updike and, a bit further back, Nabokov. This is instructive in my understanding of Doxology as a similar work of totemic satire. In this novel, Zink turns from the ex-urban keel of those plaid authors of the post-50s to the millennial New York compendiums of the Jonathans: Franzen, Safran Foer, Lethem, and so on. Doxology indeeds read as a languid deconstruction of a Jonathan Safran Foer novel that never existed. Like many of those authors' books, it tries to capture too much, traversing 50 years of history in a fleet 400 pages, Forrest Gumping through some of the greatest hits of Historical Importance. But Zink is too smart and funny to invoke empty signifiers without emphasizing their emptiness. Sure, 9/11 kills a character, but not in any Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close sort of way. Sure, the characters are NYC punks lurking in CBGB's, but they are also busy making funk music with dentists to pay the bills.

I do worry, though, that the 2016 election may have broken Zink a bit; the last 100 pages circle around that historical moment, and really did put a damper on my enthusiasm for this book. There are moments where Zink's immense talent for crafting an absurdly mundane sentence shines through, but often it feels a bit like recitation of points that were often exhausting enough to live through in real life.