In the novel “Avalon”, Nell Zink tells the story of a clever, penniless teenager who dares to climb the ladder in an exploitative society.
When the first-person narrator in Nell Zink’s new novel “Avalon” drives north along the Pacific Coast Highway, which connects Los Angeles to the Bay Area, and when she takes the opportunity to contemplate her native California, it sounds something like the exiles in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels remember Russia. So the air over the lagoons “hangs with a thick layer of salty spray and mist, blurring the roaming birds and pastel tinting the fluorescent windsurfing sails”.