Connecting the Dots

Adam Sobsey talks with Nell Zink and explores her new novel “Sister Europe.”

By Adam SobseySeptember 7, 2025

• Fiction

“YOU’RE A CRAZED neurotic artist and think nothing you do is good enough,” Nell Zink tells me. “That was the problem I used to have.” She doesn’t anymore. She has written and published five novels in barely a decade since her first, The Wallcreeper (2014)—one of the most startling and assured debuts in recent American literature—and conjoined two earlier novellas for publication in one volume (2016’s Private Novelist). Zink has been nominated for a National Book Award and—a month after the March release of her latest novel, Sister Europe—won a Guggenheim, which she’ll use to work on a screenplay based on historical material. Since Jonathan Franzen’s much-publicized assist in launching her literary career in the 2010s, for which Zink continues to express gratitude, she has confidently established herself among the upper ranks of American novelists.

“I wanted to create a book of stories within stories,” Zink recently said of Sister Europe, a book alive with fables, yarns, and anecdotes. “I was interested in the fabulization of daily life,” she told me.

A lot of people I know devote a great deal of energy to embedding their lives in some meaningful context. The alternative is profound depression. If you can’t get a good story going in which you’re playing a role that you can live with, you’re just going to be sad, and you have an ongoing midlife crisis every day of your life.

Zink staves off the sadness by writing in an insistently comic register derived from what she once called a “core of sappy humanism.” Her characters are idealistic, often precocious young people, ardently rewriting themselves as they go and doing what they can to change the story around them. Some undertake quixotic efforts to save the environment or combat the recrudescent right wing; others try to establish self-sustaining countercultural communities or simply escape oppressive personal circumstances. In Zink’s second novel, Mislaid (2015), they even change their race.

Zink is a spirited and sharp indicter of injustice, greed, bigotry of many kinds, collective cultural delusion, and abuses of power both personal and political. Only a few pages into Sister Europe, she takes her rapier to “elected officials and the superrich,” those overlapping classes of self-dealing elites who make our laws and control our commerce—in other words, who dominate our lives. These people, Zink succinctly observes, are “certifiably insane”; worse, “no law applies to them.” Just two short chapters later, though, Zink’s third-person narrator turns philosophical and resigned: “Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone. You can’t really relax until you give up on it,” she instructs the reader, at once breezy and bleak.

Sister Europe is “full of right-thinking people who want to be a force for good,” Zink told me, “but there’s very little political activism on their minds ever.” The story is organized around an award ceremony for an illustrious and fatuous Arab novelist who has been given a $54,000 career achievement prize by an aging royal benefactress. In Zink’s always refreshingly contrarian fashion, the ceremony itself, which takes place at the InterContinental Berlin hotel, is a virtual nonevent: the speeches are lame and droning, there’s no alcohol out of respect for the Muslim honoree, and the princess herself is absent. In her place, she has sent her entitled and utterly uninterested playboyish grandson Radi, who makes only a “belated and cursory visit to the event he was ostensibly hosting.” He ejects early to pick up a trans teenager named Nicole, who is in the hotel bar entirely by associative happenstance: her American-expat art-critic father Demian is one of the event’s invitees, and a friend of his named Toto, a publisher of music books who is also attending, ran across Nicole on the street en route to the event. She appeared to be trying to prostitute herself, so Toto extricated her by having her tag along with him. (Nicole was only trying to ascertain, partway through her trans journey, whether she could pass as a hot babe.)

The half-dozen “right-thinking people” Zink has assembled for our consideration and entertainment don’t hang around the hotel for long. They spill out into a wayward walkabout around Berlin that lasts into the wee hours, followed by a hapless plainclothes policeman who has been tailing Nicole since he spotted her apparently streetwalking. The group’s stops include a druggy underground rave (it’s Berlin, after all), Burger King, and the site where the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into the Landwehr Canal after her 1919 execution by Weimar authorities. (Even in fabulist mode, Zink doesn’t relinquish her political consciousness.)

Zink’s previous novel, Avalon (2022), set in her native California, was her most autobiographical book. “It crossed my mind that my next novel could be about expats,” she told me. In her habitually industrious way, she got right to it. Nearly all Zink’s fiction has been set in the United States, and usually follows people struggling simply to get by. In Sister Europe, she tells me,

I’m working through the encounter that I’ve had since I began publishing with people who have more money. I was getting glimpses of parts of Berlin that I hadn’t known existed and ways of living that I hadn’t known existed. I know an architecture critic, and I met him once for coffee at a sidewalk café. I remember the dramatic way he turned and waved his arm to take in both sides of the street and said, “In every single one of these apartments, there is an extremely large dining table made of tropical hardwood that seats 14, but there has never been a dinner party.”

In a way, Sister Europe is a dinner party recast as a sort of impromptu Debordian dérive, in which the dramatis personae lurch through their cockeyed and sometimes shared psychogeographies. The mood and witty badinage stay mostly dinner-party light, alcohol plays a role, and despite the occasional hint of danger, nothing really bad befalls the group, as is Zink’s wont. In interviews, she has expressed a staunch and humane distaste for books that rely on violence and brutality to generate interest, and her work lets her characters live and breathe while still confronting them with mortal reckonings.

It’s a surprise to learn—though perhaps it shouldn’t be, given Zink’s propensity for subverting expectations and conventions—that the character she started with for Sister Europe is so insubstantial that the music book publisher Toto literally calls her “the Flake.” She keeps ghosting dating-app arrangements with him, trailed by excuses that take the form of flighty and implausible anecdotes. Naturally, the Flake, whose real name is Avianca (“I know it’s an airline,” she says, before anyone else can), shows up at the InterContinental. She gives off a coquettish, elusive sexuality—Toto spends much of the novel trying to figure out if she’s going to sleep with him or not, and what the sex will be like—but otherwise offers little more than “her own projection,” as Radi says of her. “She exists by fiat and consensus.”

The older, sadder Livia, a friend of Demian’s—“beautiful and tragic,” in his words—lends Sister Europe its heft. The character is “based on a real person, a charismatic, beautiful, amazing, real person that I only barely know,” Zink says, “so my imagination could run riot.” Livia is the granddaughter of a Nazi pilot, an inherited legacy that haunts her. She lives in a literal glass house—at once laid bare, untouchable, and unmoving for fear of breakage. She dreams of moving to the Drömling, a nature preserve where her family owns land, to realize her vision of “a reception center for traumatized refugee children, with therapy horses.” It’s clear, though, that the refuge is really for herself. “[W]hen I feel alone,” she says, “I feel free.”

Livia’s arc through Sister Europe—precisely the “ongoing midlife crisis” Zink’s fiction fights off—gives the story emotional depth, lending substance and shadow to a dérive that might otherwise lack them. But if it’s true that “you can’t really relax until you give up on [life],” then Toto is right to call bullshit on Livia’s Drömling dreaming: “You want to change your life without changing your life,” he admonishes her. Nearly all of Sister Europe’s characters don’t just abstain from social and political activism; they barely possess any personal self-assertion. (The lone exception, transitioning Nicole, is only 15, too young to know that the “excruciating phase” of life is in fact lifelong.) Livia later admits that it was “stupid” to say she wanted to change her life and flips the script on herself. “Life should change me,” she decides. “I don’t want to be destructive of a living thing, flattening it with my identity,” a word she utters in the italics of disgust.

Near the end of Sister Europe, Zink surprisingly pairs Livia with the least likely of the men in the group. Instead of her peer Demian—her close friend, but married—or Toto (too old, and still too much the player to be a serious suitor), Livia finds herself alone in her glass house with Radi the young prince, who is mired in his own funk. He has already tried and failed, spectacularly, to get into Nicole’s dress (an unaccustomed offense to his sense of personal entitlement) and missed a chance to party with his rich friends, who don’t respond to his late-night texts. It’s “one of the most irretrievably stupid nights of his life,” he thinks. But in the predawn hours, he has an exhausted romantic encounter with Livia: that familiar near-inevitability of two people, drawn together by heightened circumstances and resigned fatigue, who have given up on life (or at least on this excruciating night) and relax into each other in body and soul.

The scene between Livia and Radi is as close to climactic as Sister Europe gets (it belongs to the “meander” category in Jane Alison’s 2019 study of literary strategies), and Zink scripts and directs it with patient and delicate restraint—the episode is truly a piece of realism, not fable. The novel concludes with the ghost of longing hanging over it, trailed by unfulfilled passion, pathos, and regret, even as the superior adult wisdom of not changing one’s life triumphs in the end. The fabulist first line, “It rained for forty days and forty nights,” which introduces Demian’s opening bedtime story about a tsunami that threatens to destroy all of sister Europe, connects, finally, to its last, in which, exhausted after a long day’s journey into night, he takes off his clothes and gets into a restorative shower.

Sister Europe hasn’t got the autobiographical poignancy of Avalon or the careening first-novel intensity of The Wallcreeper, and Zink’s political voice is much quieter here than it was in the three novels between them. But the new volume’s fabulist poetics, architectural simplicity, and lightness of touch demonstrate the sure-handed artisanship of a seasoned midcareer writer who is anything but “crazed” and “neurotic.” “I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life, so I know how to work,” she explains. “And I’m eager not to waste time.”

She has had to embrace wasting some of it. Zink is so vigorous and productive at her desk—she writes in her little apartment in Bad Belzig, about an hour’s drive from Berlin (“I’m not one of those people who needs a co-working space to concentrate, or to keep from drifting into doing random stuff on the internet”)—that the publishing industry can’t accommodate the novel-a-year it’s easy to imagine her completing. Her agent occasionally counsels her to slow down. (“Also,” Zink adds, “if I wrote too often, I’d write the same book twice, which would be doofy.”) Taking a break to work on her Guggenheim-supported screenplay helps pace her book output. Asked whether she might like to write nonfiction or perhaps plays—her ear for lively dialogue makes her a natural dramatist, and Dwight Garner’s recent review of Sister Europe in The New York Times astutely compared her to the playwright Wallace Shawn—her answer is a firm no. She knows who she is and isn’t, and she isn’t shy about naming her strengths: “I’m pretty good at pattern recognition, connecting the dots.”

Nor does Zink have any desire, despite her enduring attachment to the Tidewater region of Virginia, where she grew up, to repatriate to the United States. “I moved to Germany thinking it might be a five-year plan and realized no, this is the place,” she says. That was a quarter century ago. “Life here is easy. My rent is 330 euros. This works for me personally. I’m not leaving.” Her long exile has given her sharp perspective on our country’s ills and injustices. A substantial section of her 2019 novel Doxology is allocated to a concise, composed analysis of the perils of Donald Trump in power. (She shares Demian’s “gift for making things so complicated they became simple”—and goes him one better by editing out the complications.) And she is quick to apprehend Trump’s popularity as part of a gradual global authoritarian tilt that she has witnessed firsthand. For three years in the late 1990s, Zink lived in Israel, where she participated in protests against Benjamin Netanyahu: “a fucking awful guy,” she calls him, “a fascist even 40 years ago.” Her literary work and foundations, as well as her personal life, reveal a long and close connection to Jewish culture and thought (though Zink isn’t Jewish herself), and she has a historical understanding of Israel’s current crisis that is at once characteristically complex and potently distillable. “Long before October 7,” she says, “when people would start to tell me their opinion about Israel, I always had a test question for them: before the West Bank was occupied by Israel, what country was there? And I never, ever met anyone who knew the answer.”

There is something bracing—and, perhaps, telling—about Zink’s almost confrontational sizing-up of a potential interlocutor before proceeding. Her novels have been warm-blooded, funny, and generally sanguine of temperament since The Wallcreeper, and Sister Europe is her most unruffled volume so far. In conversation, she is kind, down-to-earth, funny, and generous with her time and responses. But her opinions are strong, firm, sometimes blunt, and she doesn’t pull punches. If she doesn’t like something or someone (or someone’s novel), she says so. She has an explicit intolerance for foolishness or time-wasting, ready with her voice or pen to dissect, correct, counsel, or provoke, and she needs little time and few words to do it.

Because Sister Europe’s fabulism gives it the feel of a dream, it’s tempting to see each of its characters as a partial projection of their dreamer. Perhaps the one Zink most closely resembles is, surprisingly, a bit player who appears only in the novel’s first and last scenes. Harriet, the wife of Demian and mother to their eldest daughter, Nicole, stays home with their younger four-year-old (to whom Demian told the bedtime tsunami story) while Demian and Nicole are out on their late-night misadventure. She doesn’t even own a dress to wear to a literary award banquet, let alone possess the desire to attend one. Harriet is “a hard-headed Ohioan” descended from Mennonites, gainfully employed as a structural engineer—a “competent creative achiever” who has “spen[t] her life achieving dominance in a male-dominated field.” Mutatis mutandis, this sounds rather like Nell Zink: an exemplary, highly competent creative achiever who knows how to work, is ascendant in a male-dominated field, lives simply and works diligently, and engineers well-made structures rather than being seen among the literati at banquets, sashaying out into the big city and “flattening” the world with her “identity.”

Harriet doesn’t get enough airtime in Sister Europe to reveal a Zinkian core of sappy humanism, but she is nonetheless tirelessly compassionate. When Demian and Nicole finally stagger into their house in the gray predawn, Harriet is still awake, maternally conscientious, going through emails on her laptop. She ensures that her husband and daughter are okay but asks no further questions. Perhaps she genuinely doesn’t care what high jinks they’ve gotten up to—another story-within-story, and one that doesn’t need retelling. You get the sense, though, that Harriet already knows everything she needs to know, possessed of the same advanced abilities in pattern recognition and dot-connecting with which her creator is endowed.