Ron Charles's Reviews > Doxology

“He started playing ukulele soon after his mother died.”

Even blindfolded, I would know that is a sentence by Nell Zink. That subtle intersection of the ordinary and the absurd is her trademark maneuver. Wit ricochets around her straight-faced sentences like marbles in a can. Every funny phrase sounds tossed off under her breath, an irreverent little prize for the attentive reader.

Even the facts of her life sound slightly surreal. For a few years she produced a zine about punk musicians and their pets. She was discovered by Jonathan Franzen after writing to him about a German ornithologist. She has worked in construction and holds a PhD in media studies. She is, one starts to suspect, a character in a novel by Nell Zink.

But despite its eccentricities, her latest book, “Doxology,” is surprisingly conventional. It is a long novel about an East Coast family woven into recent historical and political events. This time around, there is no straining against the dimensions of reality, no postmodern backflips. It feels like a quirky genius trying her best to behave at the dinner table.

The first, and best, section of “Doxology” is about the unusual friendship between several people born in the late ‘60s. The heroine, Pam, grows up in Northwest Washington to a pair of WASPy parents who. . . .

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