Mostly, these musical hopefuls end up working predatory contract jobs or night shifts to pay the bills and never really achieve much on the musical front, as life and a lack of professional connections get in their way. In “Marmalade Sky,” a short story adapted from her 2019 novel Doxology, we meet a group of poor, grungy musicians who have decided to start a band in 1980s New York City. The book joins a compendium of novels and short stories by Zink whose artist characters find it difficult to make ends meet. There is Hollywood, there are lights, but only the rich are allowed to enjoy them.Ī valon is Zink’s first novel set in California, but it is not the first time she has examined the ways in which the American economy inhibits young, creative people from living comfortably or successfully within it. The denizens of Zink’s California use their money to pursue art, and they use that art to make more money. The elite of Southern California might not be Wall Street wealthy, but in Zink’s view, they are something perhaps even worse: They use their capital to advance themselves in cultural domains as well as economic ones. As we accompany Bran on her journey, we are constantly presented with a big, gaping question: How does a young person become an artist in a world that caters mostly to the rich? Avalon is not an inherently political book, but it has a political message nonetheless.

This last type of work, the novel suggests, has been sucked of its inherent value by the profit-making machine of Hollywood and also by the Internet, which we increasingly turn to in order to make sense of what kinds of art and creativity are valued and valuable.

Bran moves in with a friend’s parents, falls in love with an aspiring Rhodes scholar, and ultimately does what a lot of people in Los Angeles end up doing: She tries her hand at screenwriting.Īvalon is Zink’s sixth novel, and it could be described as something of a Trojan horse: Its exterior has the appearance of a classic bildungsroman, but it contains a wry and biting critique of social mobility, labor exploitation, and creative work in Southern California.

Bran doesn’t quite know how she will avoid this fate, but for the rest of the book, we follow her attempts to do everything in her power to escape it. Bran’s high school classmates are all headed to universities like UCLA, UCSD, Cal Poly, and Yale, while Bran appears destined for a life that is not all that different from the one she is currently living: working on the farm, manicuring plants with a pair of gas-powered hedge clippers, and accruing sooty calluses.

Private novelist by nell zink