THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 65
Bull wants to spread the rumor that
Trump has been involved in a pedophilia
ring. “Character assassination works,” he
argues in front of Clinton Party oper-
atives, who refuse to run negative ads.
We know what’s coming. Soon Bull in-
forms Flora that the same charges have
been levelled at the Clinton campaign
by the Pizzagaters.
Zink sends Flora out into contested
territory: Towanda, Pennsylvania. Flora
begins an affair with Aaron, a Clinton
staffer assigned to knock on doors in
the same Zip Codes. When Flora talks
with Aaron about climate change, he
gives her a bleak picture of the politi-
cal situation without trying to make
light of it: “There was no sarcasm or
anger in his delivery. He meant it word
for word—a deadpan vision of dark-
ness—but he was beaming while he said
it. He was trying and failing to feel im-
plicated in the sad state of the world.”
Feeling implicated and implicating
others emotionally in the state of the
world—this is also a task for novelists.
Zink’s presentation of Democratic stu-
pidity or the limitations of corporate en-
vironmentalism is one way of highlight-
ing the absurdity of our era: not by
exaggeration but by changing its con-
text. Like “Saturday Night Live” come-
dians reading the President’s tweets on
air, it’s a way of folding one genre into
another, of showing the madness of the
real by casting it in another light. Zink’s
move toward realism may be her attempt
to take material that her readers have
spent three years mulling over and make
it fresh—an attempt to stop stretching
reality and acknowledge it instead.
That is one way of confronting a re-
ality that seems ludicrous to its core.
“The actuality is continually outdoing
our talents, and the culture tosses up
figures almost daily that are the envy of
any novelist,” Philip Roth remarked in
his 1961 essay “Writing American Fic-
tion,” decades before a porn star went
on television to compare the President’s
penis to a mushroom. By hewing more
closely to a shared idea of the present,
Zink may be using her talents not to
invent but to understand. Notably, the
book leaves Trump in the background.
Zink is looking at the rest of us, entan-
gling her readers in a state of affairs
they’ve seen develop around them.
But this shakiness between reality and
satire also suggests some skepticism about
what, precisely, a novelist—or an activ-
ist or any individual—can accomplish.
Zink’s characters are essentially power-
less—powerless against big labels, against
environmental catastrophe, against the
political-financial complex. The charac-
ters don’t even have the force that comes
from conviction. As Flora becomes a
Green Party fixture, she finds that “pol-
itics no longer excited her. She knew why
she chanted slogans: she needed regular
doses of trance inducement to mask the
struggle’s increasing difficulty and di-
minishing marginal returns.” But satire
needs people to believe in the power of
speech if it’s to be effective. It depends
on the idea that words can act where
there is no money and no might. If words
have no power, then satire doesn’t have
any, either. It becomes an eye roll rather
than a weapon.
Zink has spent her career probing
the extent to which people on the fringes
can change the world around them. But
what does making art mean in a world
where no creation can bring together
individuals who feel flattened by poli-
tics? Midway through the novel, Joe
Harris comes back in spirit when his
cover of “Bird in God’s Garden”—“a
neo-pseudo-Sufi-hippie-Gnostic num-
ber”—becomes an unexpected hit. (A
New Yorker profile appears, full of mis-
takes.) It’s difficult to imagine “a nation”
that would gather around a single song.
Part of the reason that Zink’s barbs,
however pointed, seem to ricochet from
one victim to the next is that they lack
the conviction that they’ll land on a
public ready to respond. How do you
empower people who can unite only
through dread?
Flora’s affair with Aaron leads to preg-
nancy. Like her mother, she decides to
keep the child: “Abortion had little ap-
peal for her. Her life plan had always in-
cluded children.... She was young and
underemployed. Why not go for it?” At
the end of the novel, neither Bull nor
Aaron is involved, and Flora is back in
New York contemplating the challenge
of rearing a child on her own.
“Count your blessings,” Daniel tells
his daughter. “You’re a free woman now
under the matriarchy, about to reinvent
family life in accordance with femi-
nist principles.” And then: “He rolled
his eyes.” WHAT’S
THE
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IDEA?
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