Mostly, the characters take long, early-20s walks, go to punk shows, and grit their teeth through the kind of disturbingly fast life changes that most novelists pretend don't happen. Ideas about music and religion float around, soon - we hope - to coalesce. The omniscient narrator does a bit too much arch political musing, but it's funny. The Lower East Side part of Doxology is diffuse in a good way. Their best friend and bandmate, Joe Harris, is a mildly intellectual disabled 'louche mooncalf' who is about to become a rock star. The three main characters in Doxology's first section crash unforgettably to life in a $100-a-month Lower East Side loft ( Doxology is set in the 1980s, when that was possible) rented by Daniel Svoboda, an 'eighties hipster' who lives 'in a state of persistent ecstasy.' His girlfriend, Pam Bailey, who introduces herself as 'Pam Diaphragm,' is an Ian MacKaye-obsessed punk runaway from mannered Northwest D.C. Zink is a vivid, voicey writer exceptionally gifted at both wryness and character development. Sentence to sentence, Doxology is still very funny. for the first time in Zink's career, the comedy never quite works. It provides a linear socio-cultural overview of upper-class American political behavior from the rise of hardcore punk to the rise of Donald Trump, and for the first time in Zink's career, the comedy never quite works.

Kathryn Schulz wrote in a 2015 New Yorker profile that Zink is 'a comic writer par excellence, one whose particular gift is the capacity to keep a perfectly straight face.' In her previous work, particularly the semi-Shakespearean social comedy Mislaid and the madcap eco-adventure The Wallcreeper, Zink combined that capacity with a wild imagination and an impulse for zigzagging, lies, and big ideas mashed up with big plot moves. To me, Zink is the English language's funniest literary novelist. That difference proves the downfall of Nell Zink's fifth novel, Doxology, in which Pizzagate makes a brief appearance.

Pizzagate taught me the difference between absurdity and humor. It was also homophobic, viciously cruel, and - even before an armed vigilante showed up to 'self-investigate' - too frightening to be funny. The conspiracy, which posited Democratic Party higher-ups trafficking children for sex beneath Comet's concrete floors, was conceptually ludicrous. My office shared a wall with Comet Ping Pong, a similarly beloved pizza restaurant that became the target of the alt-right conspiracy Pizzagate.

How?ĭuring the 2016 election, I worked in events at Politics and Prose, one of Washington, D.C.'s best-beloved bookstores. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Doxology Author Nell Zink

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