7/2/2023 0 Comments Private Novelist by Nell Zink![]() ![]() ![]() Her novels, famously written quickly (three weeks is usually cited as the time it took to draft each of her first three books), do, at times, read as though they wrote themselves their startling combinations of registers and breakneck plots sometimes give the impression that they sprang directly from the author’s unconscious, if a more rigorously structured one than that of, say, the Beats. ![]() She also has a habit of killing off interesting characters sooner than seems wise, though the cheerful revenge of the bacchantes in her books rarely takes the form of physical violence. The joke, or one of the jokes, is that Zink does publish material like that-her next novel, Nicotine, was about a utopian (smokers’) commune battling its churlish landlords. But she knew you can’t publish material like that. ![]() It was gripping and seemed to write itself. The lesbians became the bacchants of Euripides, killing him in a festive manner. The villain saved his appearance for the end. She reacted by writing a play in two days and a night about a utopian lesbian commune defending itself from real estate interests. They all said the most interesting character dies too near the start. “She subscribed to Writer’s Market and queried five agents about her play The Wicked Lord,” Zink writes: There’s a funny sequence halfway through Nell Zink’s second novel, Mislaid, in which one of the main characters, a frustrated playwright, tries without much luck to get her career off the ground. ![]()
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