Doxology by Nell Zink is a novel on a huge scale—an intergenerational narrative that plows through several American Zeitgeists. One couple, Pam and Daniel, sit at the center, with Pam’s parents acting as one generational bookend and Pam and Daniel’s daughter Flora acting as another. As it flows between these three generational coordinates, Doxology offers something like a contemporary cultural history—a report on American habits of the heart and mind. The novel covers the post angst, post punk cynicism of the 80s, the mutation into ethical moroseness of the 2000s sustainability consciousness, and finally teeters past the 2016 election. There are wonderful scenes that show the wobbliness of this trajectory. At one point, Pam and Daniel, proudly emotionally jaded, thwarted and confused in the aftermath of the 2016 election, practice pretend parkour while coming home from a movie. They have no idea what they are doing and they give into it totally, not being foolish about being fools. It’s one of the most lighthearted scenes in the book.
Heralding the millennial generation is Pam and Daniel’s daughter, Flora. In a certain sense, I am Flora. I was born in Manhattan in 1993, Flora was born in Manhattan in 1992; both of us to parents who had come to New York in the ‘80s in order to be part of all-consuming arts scenes. Flora’s parents were engaged in the music world. My parents continue to be devoted to cinema. On September 11th, 2001, Flora was picked up from 4th grade in downtown Manhattan just as I was picked up from 3rd grade in uptown Manhattan. Our stories diverge a little here, before they come together, and apart again, revealing just how much cosmology can exist between the bands of a DNA double helix.
Like many works of fiction Doxology begins with a disclaimer. “This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents, and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be constructed as real.” But Flora and I have grown into adulthood in the time of the meme, where soundbite slogans convey deep waves of contemplation. In short we know that “representation matters,” and especially as young white women, we know we have been incredibly well represented. Zink has given herself a challenge. She has to make something… novel. And I don’t believe she’s succeeded. I started our absorbed in Doxology, but in time Zink’s meld of conventional wisdom and representation rendered reading agonizing. It didn’t have to end this way! I didn’t want it to end as it did.
I’ve had a ton of time to sit with my discomfort of this novel. I live in a semi-monastic Zen farm, so my turn-around time with this book has obviously been much longer than that of professional reviewers. I’ll allow as well that that my arguments with Zink are mixed up with arguments with myself. I just can’t shake Flora’s story. Zink raises Flora up as a young woman who, primarily due to her stints in school, can’t help but have her sense of self informed by a universal ethical compulsion. That’s to say, Flora understands Flora only as an actor in the desperate attempt to rectify a broken world. At the book’s end, Flora withdraws from the mirror of the world and slips her obsession with ethics. Having accidentally become pregnant, she retreats into the soft cocoon of her family’s wealth. I want to be clear—Zink frames Flora’s choice to parent as a withdrawal. I don’t.
In 2018, I was not pregnant, but I was beyond exhausted from linking my understanding of my own person-hood to political ways of being. I left politics too, though unlike Flora I wasn’t a political operative, I worked in a non-partisan part of city government, acting on the belief that functionaries in such institutions—in all our public institutions—have the moral imperative to do everything they can to serve all people. I left, in part, because I’d become disenchanted with the state of the public sector in a privatized city, and in part because I had begun to hear the calls of deeply rooted activists and proponents for broader social change. These were calls that underscored how we should never turn away from the oppressions we saw. These were calls that reminded us that to transform this world, we must engage with the full force of our complete selves. Flora feels her way toward the limits of her own narrow conception of a partisan politicized identity as she surfs away from the waves of instant reactivity she sees sweeping over the Left into her own angst about which partner to choose to help parent her child. Yet this self-enrapt turn is what makes the novel’s end so particularly frustrating.
When I moved to this Zen Center in December 2018, I constantly felt like I needed to explain why I would do such a thing. I spoke about it often with one friend in particular, who remains deeply enmeshed in campaigns and activism. Afterwards I wrote my family, “B. and I talked last night and we said that we felt like a lot of us, who were emerging from delineated life systems like college or programs, then entering the workforce at the same time as the election, deeply internalized the fear and urgency and immediacy of these problems, that these problems became the way we saw ourselves. Not just the work and the actions that we were engaged in as our deepest sense of selves. And that internalized urgency and conflict, it’s now leaving so many of us depleted with no real rejuvenating sense of how we can be in the world. And many of us are waking up to that.”
This is, perhaps selfishly, the personal yet generational drama of our lives and times that I wish Zink had allowed Flora to grow into. Not because I want affirmation in print of how my own self-authored story is playing out (though ultimately that’s what all of Zink’s characters crave). But because an ending as stale as the one served up in the text feels less than urgent, Caught up in a fixation with jadedness, Zink fails to imagine what it might mean for someone to engage in life and politics, not just in a narrow tactical fashion, but with a whole-soul approach. By copping out with Flora, Zink cheapens even her own characters, her own text, and certainly vitiates her own message. As one human to another, I can only hope Zink opens her eyes wider next time, to allow for life lived beyond the confines of old, familiar spaces.