Nicotine

A most unusual and original story by Nell Zink, about identity, family and home. Is Nicotine an addiction? I was surprised to learn that it is a house, a squat. The story is unexpectedly funny and well written, and fierce Penny an engaging heroine. A book to entertain and provoke thought.

Here's the text from my review for the Dallas Morning News. Direct link posted below:

Smoking is supposed to kill, but in Nell Zink's audacious horror-comedy, Nicotine, it saves lives by giving meaning to young activists' existence as they fight for smokers' equality. This is just one of many incendiary contradictions in Zink's dense but wonderfully unpredictable new novel.

It's not all empty provocation, however. As the book unfolds, Zink's polarizing claims about the world pile up like layers of sinful baklava, each uneven and lacking by itself, but together forming a complex -- if nutty -- whole. In essence, Nicotine is delicious, but it will leave you feeling a little sick afterward.
It opens in 2005 in Northern New Jersey on pre-teen Penny Baker as she smokes naked in her father Norman's sweat lodge. The daughter of a South American Kogi tribal woman and a Jewish shamanist, Penny finds herself often in situations at odds with American suburbia. Her family walks through the house without clothes, high on hallucinogens and talking openly about sexuality and death.


The story then flashes forward to present-day New Jersey, where Norman is [old and] dying in hospice. Penny, now in her 20s, cares for him all by herself (her strange but middle-class family is much too busy to lend a hand.) His death is a brutal, weeks-long process that Zink captures in gruesome detail of bodily decay.
After the funeral, Penny learns that her father's abandoned childhood home still stands--barely, her family says -- and that it's hers if she wants it. When she visits she finds it taken over by a band of friendly pro-nicotine activists. She's immediately attracted to squatter Rob, a handsome, self-proclaimed asexual who fixes bicycles for cash. He lives with several others, including Jazz, a Kurdish sexpot who limps from one too many run-ins with the police.
The house -- now branded Nicotine -- is one of many squatters' co-ops, Penny's told, all run by an activist union of sorts. Having fallen hard for Rob, Penny moves in to Nicotine's sister-house Tranquility, and through acts of friendship and love, becomes entangled with a counterculture so bizarre it counters even the shamanistic hippie-sphere once ruled by her father.

Nicotine's outlandish plot grows more capricious after Matt, Penny's much older half-brother, meets and falls for Jazz. Their coupling inspires him to reclaim the house as his, which in turn starts a turf war and ups the book's horror factor (a scene involving Matt trapped in Nicotine with a tower of buckets containing fermented human waste is not for the weak of stomach). Despite such density, Nicotine never loses its clarity or momentum.

Zink propels her plot forward, in part, by constantly throwing into question the validity of her characters' choices. "Nobody owns money," argues Sunshine, one of Penny's activist friends. "It's a medium of exchange, with a value assigned by a corrupt system. You have to reject it." He hasn't held a job in years, choosing instead to freeload off the good will of others. Meanwhile, Matt -- the wealthy villain -- makes his money by manufacturing environmentally friendly garbage trucks. By highlighting both the villain's worthwhileness and the heroes' shortfalls, Zink makes a persuasive argument for ideological compromise.

At no point, however, does Nicotine read like a theoretical screed. Emotionally rich and psychologically compelling, it unfolds largely in dialogue that crackles and sparks like frayed electrical wires in a squat house. Consider Rob's response to Penny's lament that the residents of Nicotine must stand at the back of every protest (because Zink's other activists oppose smoking): "That's how discrimination works...you exclude people because they have something meaningless in common, and pretty soon they're one big family." It's a small social insight in a passage about something else entirely--their collective fear of getting arrested--but it lights up the page like a bomb going off.

It's worth noting that no actual bombs go off in Nicotine, despite it hitting shelves during an era of widespread, politically motivated terrorism. The violence that does occur is hyper-localized and rooted in hurt feelings between lovers and friends. This is another of Zink's remarkable achievements: Pain between people registers as deeply as clashes between ideologies.

Nicotine is therefore an immensely humane novel. Yes, its imagery shocks and occasionally disgusts, but its call to action is clear: Love one another, no matter what, however deep our chasms of difference.

I have heard it said: "I don't like smoking. I just smoke because I'm addicted to it."

That is how I felt reading [book:Nicotine|28434290]. At times, I felt the story relied too much on variations of the same theme (millenial behaviour) and it got a bit tiring. Still, I could not stop reading. And every couple of pages I would giggle to myself.

Want my next Nell Zink fix.

(Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy.)