There’s a moment in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Teddy,” in which a boy watches his younger sister drink a glass of milk. He describes this vision as God “pouring God into God.” Nell Zink’s new novel, “Sister Europe,” ends with a moment so lambent — but it takes one excruciating, tangled, exhilarating, humiliating night to get us there.
Many novels take place over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Nicholson Baker’s “The Mezzanine.” Fewer chart the course of a single evening, as does “Sister Europe” — although Haruki Murakami’s “After Dark” is another that comes to mind.
To stay out late in Zink’s world, loitering, is a pleasure. If you don’t know what her writing sounds like, the only word for it is Zinkish. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality — a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. If this doesn’t happen to be among her finest novels, well, it has strong consolations.
The events in “Sister Europe” occur on a Tuesday night in 2023. The place: a mediocre luxury hotel in Berlin. The occasion: a second-rate literary award ceremony. A $54,000 prize for Arabic writing is being given to a Bedouin writer who sounds a good deal like Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie character comes in for some ribbing. One wit comments that he probably uses A.I. to churn out his wordy and florid fables.
Few of the guests want to be there. The evening is drudgery. The speeches are too long, the food is execrable (one attendee calls the entree “Michelin mystery meat”) and no alcohol can be had because of the event’s Muslim hosts and guests. The prevailing mood is: Get me out of here.
Among this book’s primary characters is Demian, a German art critic, who is married to an American structural engineer named Harriet. They have a 15-year-old daughter, Nicole, who is transitioning from male to female. To her father’s surprise, Nicole turns up at the hotel with Demian’s friend Toto, an American publisher. Toto had recognized Nicole, in a party dress and with bee-stung lips, posing as a streetwalker in a red-light district, and invited her to the event to get her off the corner.
Harriet is calm about Nicole’s transition and her desire to take puberty blockers. Demian is less sanguine. He has a liberal intellect but a conservative gut, and he has an instinct to protect her from decisions made in haste. He battles his transphobia, Zink writes, but “clearly hoped Nicole would emerge from her gaudy chrysalis as just another twink in golf duds.”
Nicole is carefully and vividly drawn. She’s a bird shivering on a wire. She’s in an awkward phase, but then who isn’t at 15? Zink writes:
Who isn’t embarrassing, really, when you get down to it. Life is all about raising expectations and seeing them crushed. Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone. You can’t really relax until you give up on it.
Demian seems relatively unperturbed that his daughter was (apparently) streetwalking, and similarly unperturbed when she vanishes into the hotel with a sybaritic prince, Radi, who has sexual designs on her. No real sex takes place in this novel, though it’s gently pervy, like Mr. Whipple squeezing the Charmin.
A main topic in “Sister Europe” is indeterminacy. All of us are between stages, this novel suggests, at every moment. Another main topic is Berlin and its discontents. Zink, who has lived in and around the city for many years, catalogs the ghosts that continue to haunt it.
A drawback of this short novel is that it introduces too many characters; none quite sink in. “Sister Europe” lacks the air of inevitability that a good novel has. It also lacks a sense of drama, not that the gifted Zink does not try to inject some.
All evening, an undercover cop named Klaus is following Nicole, thinking she may be the victim of sex trafficking. He represents the Chekhovian gun that keeps threatening to go off. He’s an oddly comic fellow. In a film version, he’d be portrayed by the wonderful Yuriy Borisov, who plays the fragile and sentimental hired muscle in “Anora.”
After the ceremony, the characters spill out onto Berlin’s wet, chilly, windswept streets. The merry revelers — among them Demian, Nicole, Radi, Toto and a young woman nicknamed the Flake (whom Toto met on a dating app) — form a sexy caravan. People stop and stare. Zink has a way of rendering even a late-night walk indelible, as if each moment has been tapped with a sprinkle from Tinkerbell’s wand:
Radi strolled with his hands in his pockets and his human dignity on max, in part because the Flake at his side was literally skipping. She knew how to do the special skip from “The Wizard of Oz,” lifting the forward leg and sliding the rear one sideways behind it before switching legs with a leap, and she was doing it with gusto, like a Cossack dancing the hopak, as she crossed Bachstrasse.
I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that these characters, along with an intimidating poodle, end up together in a space that functions as a kind of black-box theater, one with Nazi associations. Bring your black turtleneck; you may briefly feel you are in an absurdist Wallace Shawn play. Some of the characters pair off. For others, it’s a school night.
The cop is outside looking in. Is he really a gentle screw-up? Or will that Chekhovian gun finally go off?
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