The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink (Artist)

Nell Zink’s debut novel follows a downwardly mobile secretary from Philadelphia who marries an ambitious soon-to-be-expat pharmaceutical researcher in hopes that she will never work again. They end up in Germany, where it turns out that her new husband is tougher, sneakier, more sincere, more contradictory, and smarter than she is; she’d naturally thought it was impossible. Life becomes complicated with affairs, birding, and eco-terrorism. Bad things happen, yet they stagger through, clinging to each other from a safe distance.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels, Book Club, American, Germany

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2014

About the author

Nell Zink was raised in rural Virginia, a setting she draws on in her second novel, Mislaid. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary. In 1993, while living in West Philadelphia, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997.

Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. She moved to Germany in May 2000, completing a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Tübingen. Zink has been married twice, to US citizen Benjamin Alexander Burck and to Israeli composer and poet Zohar Eitan.

After 15 years writing fiction exclusively for a single pen pal, the Israeli postmodernist Avner Shats, Zink caught the attention of Jonathan Franzen. The two writers began a correspondence.

In early 2012, Zink sent Franzen her collected manuscripts. Franzen tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers in her 1998 novel. It was Franzen’s agent who ultimately negotiated a six-figure publishing deal for Zink’s Mislaid, a novel she has described as “agent bait”.

ZInk's debut, The Wallcreeper, was published by Dorothy, a publishing project in the US in 2014 and named one of 100 Notable Books of 2014 by The New York Times. Zink lives in Bad Belzig, Germany.

Reviews

[J.A. Carter-Winward · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reviews: the reason people read reviews is to decide for themselves whether they want to invest their time and energy into reading a novel. That said, this is only my subjective opinion, and reflects, not on the author personally, but on this particular work of fiction.

I read the New York Times book review of The Wallcreeper after I'd already finished the book and what came to my mind was, The Emperor's New Clothes. But the NY Times and the famous "blurber" want us to see gilded gold and refined cloth. Since I'm not among the NYC literati, all I saw was a sagging, naked ass.

Ms. Zink’s writing attempts to hoodwink us into thinking it's fresh and new. With patchwork prose, dry-but-flat humor, bleak, pretentious levity, and the blasé tone of a "challenging, post-modern voice that defies definition," it's hardly new. For me, the book read like a brand new MFA grad trying too hard not to try hard, thus producing a written "inside joke" posing as highbrow literature. So, I know how to define this type of novel easily enough--it starts with “hype” and ends with "I'll call my agent."

When I say the voice attempts to be "fresh and new" (a cliché within its own right), I'm doing what the writing fails to do: use clichés consciously, as literary devices, to point out irony. But Zink’s use of clichés throughout the book isn't ironic.

Examples: "You can't judge a book by its cover," and "I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!" Along with, "Garbage in, garbage out"--although she redeems this one a little with a slightly "fresher" spin. Most writers know, if you’re going to use clichés, the whole point of using them is to USE them and double-back, rework them, or obliterate them with the larger theme. Not the case here.

On page one we get this gem from the protag, Tiffany, an over-the-top explanation that, given the lack of clarity throughout the whole book, now seems rather quaint: “I opened the door and put my feet outside, threw up, and lay down, not in the vomit but near it.” I'm not sure why we need that spelled out for us. Could be an editor read it and said, "Oi, Nell...uh, when she lies down, it's not IN the vomit, is it? 'Cause that would be disgustin', yeah? Roight. Carry on then, I'll just clarify here..." I don't know why her editor is a Brit with a slight cockney accent but whatever, the point? This kind of clunky prose riddles the entire book.

Before the protagonist, Tiffany, throws up, her husband hits a rock in the road. It jostles her enough that she has a miscarriage. What he actually hit was a bird, a wallcreeper (is this why the title is...?!!). He leaves his wife there, bleeding, to go rescue the bird, like any husband would, naturally. Cunning use of irony? A grim sense of tongue-in-cheek? (Yes, this is who her husband is), and foreshadowing of events to come? Well, if the latter is true, then it's so on the nose, it's shudder-worthy. If it wasn't meant as foreshadowing but irony and setting the tone, then it's poor character development, but I have to concede this initial scene does indeed set the tone for the whole book and story.

So, the couple keeps the wallcreeper in their kitchen until the thing starts to molt. They must set it free! Could this be a theme? Ah, the bird is a motif, then of...but no. Because the eponymous bird and main motif get dropped less than 20% into the story and what happens next is nowhere near foreshadowing of things to come.

After they release the bird into the wild, the wallcreeper is eaten by a hawk--miraculously. Because on the very day the couple goes to watch him in his habitat, a life-ending event for the poor wallcreeper, who let's face it, was dead as soon as they let it live in their kitchen, dies right in front of their eyes. That very day. Not the day they let him out of the kitchen. No, no. Later. Disbelief suspension? Way too much to ask, here. To say deus ex machina is an understatement. I can’t remember how they were able to keep track of it, but somehow, they do, and it gets eaten. Foreshadowing again? I wish I could say “yes.” But no, it was, and is, as meaningless as it sounds, which reflects the rest of the book’s trajectory.

Going back to the beginning, here's what Tiffany, the protag, says after the rock-bird-vomit-bleeding-car incident: "I wasn't pregnant, I noticed."

This seemed totally absurd. As I said, the first lines of the book chronicle this event and her husband--acting like no husband or human being would act, EVER--cared more about rescuing the wallcreeper than his bleeding wife. I realize the author might have been attempting to use this to set us up for more post-modern bleakness. For me, it felt off-key, and contrived, and made the main character even more unlikable.

On the use of metaphor. Within the first few pages metaphors abound which, not for a lack of trying, I couldn't fathom. I think Zink was hoping readers would skim over them and not think too much about them. Kind of like poetry that's so obscure, the poet hopes readers won't use a Thesaurus, and believe the poetry is good, it’s simply too deep, obscure, or intellectual for them to grasp, when in fact, it’s simply verbal-onanism on a page. Here's the first one that caught my eye: "I clenched my hands into claws and cried like a drift log in heavy surf." I’ve never personally heard a drift log in heavy surf. I’ve seen it. Was she thrashing about?

Then her husband does something to her that once again, no human being would do, ever: "Stephen put his hands on my ears. Much later he told me he thought if I couldn't hear myself I might stop. He said it reminded him of feedback mounting in an amplifier." From the clashing metaphors to her husband acting in completely unrealistic, ridiculous ways, I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief.

There are many places where it felt like Zink was trying much too hard: "I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me."

Then this noggin' scratcher: "I was raised on art and literature, the opiates of the intellectually underprivileged." So…people who aren’t blessed with intellect…use art and literature to numb their 'stupid?' It almost feels like the author is trying too hard to be edgy, passive-aggressively insulting her audience by implying that if they enjoy art and literature (and since this book has been hyped up as a work of Literary Import), it's because you're just not good at real work (like Tiffany?) or was it self-deprecating? Well, in that case, don't be so hard on yourself, Nell. And a few more things to infer from that line... IF you’re not “intellectually underprivileged,” that is. And accordingly, I suppose reading Ms. Zink’s novel is proof-positive that we’re all idiots as we read it to escape our dearth of intellect. I really can’t see any other way to interpret this.

From page one I went from incredulity to irritation, to boredom, to incredulity again, to laughter because I was still incredulous, to relief that I was finished with the book. From what I had read, I wasn't surprised that the ending left me indifferent.

The boredom came with the didactic, eternally long passages where Stephen, the protag's husband, starts preaching (Zink's authorial intrusion) to Tiffany (us, the reader), about his thoughts (obviously Zink's obsession) on the environment and the European government's policies w/r/t the environment. It was obviously thunk-us-on-the-head clear that the author has an information fetish about environmentalism and wild birds.

I find it ironic that I've heard Jonathan Franzen rail against over-didacticism and info-fetishes, yet he was the person not only instrumental in getting Zink to write this book, and get it published, but he sang its praises as well. I loved The Corrections and Freedom, so his blurb carried weight with me. It's why I bothered reading it. He also loved David Foster Wallace's writing, which isn't exactly for the "intellectually underprivileged," is it?

The NYT book reviewer stated that the protag, like the wallcreeper, wanted to be wild and free. Oh, please. Tiffany is an apathetic, flat character, with no discernible arc throughout the book until the last 5% of the story, where she suddenly, out of the blue, does a complete 180 that I didn't see coming in any of the preceding events or internal processes (of which there were little) of her character.

It was as sudden a shift as a right angle, and utterly unbelievable. Tiffany begins, and remains throughout the book, a leech, entirely dependent financially on men because she doesn't want to work. She literally has no motivation to do anything. Not even sex. Nothing.

Finally, in one paragraph, less than 5% away from the end of the book, she exclaims, "I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!" Oh, okay, Tiff. Glad you joined the party. If this is a feminist-cry novel, then back to the fainting couches we go, ladies.

Yet, even with this “sudden change,” in the form of her telling us she’s changing, she doesn’t. She tells a male character in the book, "I just need you to save me." Now, I realize the author was probably trying to be ironic and humorous, but it can't be ironic if it's the actual truth. The man Tiffany's addressing offers her a place to live, rent-free, and only "...if you redecorate. I’ll pay for the materials. Isn't that what women want?”

Oh yeah, that’s what all women want: free rent and carte blanche to redecorate. Squee! Feminism-ing! So ultimately, Tiffany's earth-shattering epiphany that she suddenly wants to do something with her life does not preclude her continued financial dependence on men.

No, this isn't a woman craving freedom. Even with the male character's feeble attempt to make it "okay" by telling her she'd be doing him a favor by living rent-free in his house is presented, it feels like the author is "protesting too much." (She knows the speech about Tiffany “doing him the favor” is bogus, but needs it to seem like Tiffany is contributing…something, ANYTHING, to the world, even though it demands ZERO effort, action, or motivation on her part, and the requirement includes her apathetic agreement to squat for free in some guy’s house, while continuing to breathe in and out every day. Wow, makes me tired just thinking about it!) Bottom line? In the end, Tiffany is still as helpless and dependent as ever.

Meanwhile, the NYT reviewer courted the feminists by writing, "…we not only plunder our resources in an effort to 'breed and feed' but allow ourselves (especially if we are female) to be similarly plundered: physically, emotionally, spiritually, creatively."

Oh, do “we”? Speak for yourself. The key words here are "allow ourselves." What woman with any self-respect allows this? I certainly don’t. But too many women, according to the NYT writer. How is this book anything but a reflection of the victim mentality that too many people, not just women, live by to avoid taking responsibility for their life choices?

And if someone allows themselves to be “plundered,” the onus rests on the shoulders of the individual, and no one else. Not in today's world. Yet, Nell Zink writes a character all too willing to be plundered, who continues to be plundered, and then expects us to root for her when she takes an initiative that most people in today's world take by the time they've reached 18 years old.

The final nail in this book's coffin for me was when, after over 85% (give or take) of the book goes without mentioning the wallcreeper, Tiffany is called (by the man who is rescuing her for the third time) a "butterfly among the birds…" (although I am grateful we finally got a metaphor that's coherent--butterfly=change). Since I'm never really convinced that her entire personality, hopes, goals, dreams etc. change on a dime, the perfect "retort" for her, just...happens: "Do you mean I remind you of the wallcreeper?" Oh, oh. PLEASE. No. It was almost embarrassing to read.

After reading over 90% (again, give or take) of the book, the wallcreeper forgotten after 15% of it, and then the man to whom she speaks, (not even knowing about the event with the wallcreeper or in fact about wild birds at all, mind you,) drops this bomb? It felt like a desperate, wild attempt to bring the motif back to the forefront in the most contrived way.

A novel should not be a platform to proclaim your beliefs and pet causes to the world. It isn't about pretension and self-indulgence. It's about the reader, your audience. As an author, you have a sacred duty to them. They give you their time, money, and energy, and the people publishing and promoting have a duty to readers as well. Meanwhile, novelists are supposed to give their audience food for thought, "soul fodder," or at the very least an entertaining escape. Instead, this book felt like birdseed, tossed down to a starving crowd by a handful of literary misanthropes at an MFA reunion while taking a "dry-titter break" on the veranda.

But because people like Franzen and the NYT book reviewer endorse the book, readers who either don't know it or who pretend to see the clothes because they're too afraid to be singled out as "Oh, you just don't GET it, it's sooohhh over your head," will buy it and read it. And due to this current mindset, one that's beset the reading public on all sides by the NY literati for (going on) three decades now, believing we are too “intellectually underprivileged,” to really "get it," the book will earn a place in the dusty shelves of "contemporary literature" with three clusters of b.s. They pretend they see the Emperor's fine, new clothes. And even if they do "see" them, it's because they decided, long before they read it, that it was a marvel.

But what the reviewer and Franzen did when they endorsed this book was lose all credibility for me as arbiters of taste.

Bottom line. I'm voracious. I'm a hungry--starving these days--reader, always on the lookout for an author who writes with humanity, generosity, and an earnest desire to weave a compelling tale. An author who has me, their audience, in mind the entire time they're writing. And I am many things, but "intellectually underprivileged" is not one of them. Sadly, it doesn't feel like Nell Zink wrote this story for me or anyone else but herself. The net result? The Wallcreeper left me, and others who are also starving for the depiction of the human condition and experience in a fulfilling story, unfed.

*updated to reflect further reflection on the reflecting reflection of the reflective pool of smoky-mirrored reflections of the literary zeitgeist. ~ja

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely enough, this is the second female-authored 2015 bestselling US novel about an adulterous expatriate American housewife living in Switzerland that I've read this year. However, putting down Jill Alexander Essbaum's Hausfrau and turning to Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, as I did while preparing this review, feels like leaping out of a coma singing the opening bars of Sha-La-La by Al Green. Rarely do you get such a chance to see how themes that were trite and plodding with one writer can become fresh and funny when described by someone else with wit and verve and vim and brio and zest and all the other things that Zink's writing has in spades.

It's clear from other reviews that there's already some backlash against the Zink hype, which is understandable. For me, though, this was just 170 pages of pure enjoyment. And not in a fluffy way: her prose style is so smart and witty and allusive that some of the laughs came from sheer admiration. Her writing flits in and out of different tones and registers in a way that is technically much harder than it looks, and almost every double-page will throw at you literary call-backs, strange sex, binomial names, vertiginous changes of subject – random exclamations! – wading birds and excellent jokes.

When I think back now to the opening line of Hausfrau – ‘Anna was a good wife, mostly’ – it seems to sum up everything that annoyed me about that novel's satisfaction in the character's coy self-deceptions; by comparison, a similar line in The Wallcreeper – ‘I was pretty bad as wives go’ – seems refreshingly, breezily direct. The Wallcreeper's own opening line, incidentally, is already quite famous for its near-parodic, creative-writing-course compression of incident:

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.

Yep, sign me up – I was on board for this voice right away. And other comparisons are instructive too. In Hausfrau Essbaum uses German language lessons to try and reflect her character's emotional state, which involves many laboured metaphors on grammatical terms like ‘passive’ or ‘perfect’. It's a grind. Zink tries something similar but gets away with it, partly because she avoids the obvious and partly just because her ironic tone means you already grant her an assumption of self-awareness.

At Elvis's suggestion I took a course in Berndeutsch. I learned ten verbs for work: work hard (drylige, bugle, chrampfe, schaffe, wärche), get stuck with jobs no one else wants to do (chrüpple), work slowly (chnorze), work carelessly (fuuschte), work absent-mindedly (lauere). Stay at home and putter around doing little harmless chores (chlütterle). I learned fast and the teacher said maybe it was an advantage my not knowing any German. Then the ten weeks of the course were over and I didn't know anything anymore, except that I would never look for a job.

Elvis is the guy she's having extramarital sex with; he tells her he's a Montenegrin, although her husband doesn't believe it (‘He's Syrian if he's a day! “Elvis”! It's like a Filipino telemarketer calling himself Aragorn!’). All the frantic sleeping around makes the book read a little like a farce at times, except that the tone is used more as a way of dealing with difficult experiences than of avoiding them altogether. A painful and barely-consensual bout of anal sex with her husband, for instance, gets described like this:

Now, all my life I had fantasized about being used sexually in every way I could think of on the spur of the respective moment. How naïve I was, I said to myself. In actuality this was like using a bedpan on the kitchen counter. I knew with certainty that “pain” is a euphemism even more namby-pamby than “defilement.” Look at Stephen! He thinks he’s having sex! Smell his hand! It’s touching my hair! I thought, Tiff my friend, we shall modify a curling iron and burn this out of your brain. But I didn’t say anything. I acted like in those teen feminist poems where it’s date rape if he doesn’t read you the Antioch College rules chapter and verse while you’re glumly failing to see rainbows. I was still struggling to dissociate myself into an out-of-body experience when Stephen came, crying out like a dinosaur.

I gasped for air, dreading the moment when he would pull out, and thought, Girls are lame.

This is so much more complex and interesting than all the moralistically-loaded bad sex that happens in Hausfrau – just look at how often Zink shifts gears through that paragraph. Stephen is no villain and the protagonist is certainly no victim; rather her irony shatters all good/bad experiences into a kaleidoscope of annoyance, amusement, self-reflection and philosophising. The way irony interacts with sex is actually one of the most interesting parts of the book, and also one of its subjects – Zink writes revealingly at one point that it's a character's ‘incapacity for irony’ that stops her ‘from coming across […] as anything but horny’.

Certainly the plot – which concerns birdwatching and ecoterrorism – is a bit of a mishmash, and I can understand why some readers find the prose style too flyaway to settle into. I thought it was a delight, and after a few pages of submitting to its spell you realise that every single sentence is about to make you burst out laughing – although examining them in isolation, it's not always clear why. Apparently she wrote this in three weeks. I hate her, but I want more, more, more.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

They are all gaga for this novel. All of them. For all these reviewers The Wallcreeper is like a heart transplant, they’re bounding around, they’re happy again.

I don’t know, it was okay but -

It wasn’t like the day of the Rapture for American fiction. I’ve read stuff that isn’t a million miles away from Nell Zink.

Absolutely – all these people saying how weird and far out she is have never come across Alissa Nutting or Matt Bell -

Miranda July -

Or even the venerable and ancient firm of George Saunders and Saint Donald Barthelme -

(Sings) Oh oh oh wallcreeper
How come you taste so good?
Oh oh oh wallcreeper
Just like a young bird should

Anyway, I suppose we should give this damned review a try.

Well, I guess. That’s what we’re here for.

So….

It was…..

Okay!

(Sighs.)

It was like a deadpan reads-pretty-autobiographical-but-who-knows account of an expat American woman married to this American guy and living in Europe and getting interested in ecology and birds and all of that and kind of wibbling around aimlessly, quite a bit of shagging going on but some idiot said the sex was on a gross Nicholson Baker level of detail which is proof they didn’t read all of this very short novel because The Wallcreeper is not The Fermata.

The Fermata stands alone.

On a plinth of awe.

Which is in the form of an erect…

Anyway.

(Sings) Wallcreepers couldn't drag me away
Wall, wallcreepers we'll eat them some day

Actually, there were bits which I couldn’t quite understand. Does anyone know what this means?

Easterners hear “coffee culture” and think of Vienna, not longshoremen idling their pickups at a drive-through. They don’t know the uniform polo shirts at Starbucks are the alternative business model for when you want women customers to let their guard down.

No… I mean it sounds smart, it has a smart shape, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Here’s another one :

She may have been twelve. Coming from a subculture in which a pose of stubby-pawed, forthright naïveté is held to embody youthfulness right up to death from old age, I couldn’t tell.

Yeah – that sounds smart and funny but I have no idea whether it’s either.

(Sings) Wallcreeper, wallcreeper, won’t you dance with me?

But you know, it was pretty readable. It ambled along. It did give me the idea that being an ecological activist would drive you crazy because there are a thousand contradictory ideas about exactly how we should leave nature alone.

Hmmm… and I do like the idea of this writer, that she was disovered and almost instructed to write this novel by the famous Jonathan Franzen, and now she’s like famous at the age of 51.

Yay, go Zink.

She’s the poster girl for late starters.

(Sings) Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
Wallcreeper! No, we will not let you go. (Let him go!)
Wallcreeper! We will not let you go. (Let him go!)
Wallcreeper! We will not let you go. (Let me go!)

How many stars then?

Two!

Three!

Two!

2.5 it is.

Okay, good - can we go now?

(Sings) We will not let you go!

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book could have a great pulp-erotica cover and a tagline like SHE WOULD DO ANYTHING. . . FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, but instead it’s tastefully covered up by an intriguing and surrealistic front (it’s actually a great design.) I can only imagine the bewilderment of some people who were expecting a much more serious, literary book. Take for example, our current most popular review of this book, a one-star rating by a reviewer who is disappointed that this book wasn’t written with “heart,” and frankly seems outraged that these characters aren’t likable or very realistic, and going so far as to say that the New York Times unfairly “courted feminists” to read this book. Poor soul.

I suppose it’s easy to be blinded by its serious environmental concerns, but to take it too seriously is to miss out on some great fun. Our main character is Tiffany, a somewhat lazy environmentalist who marries the first man who proposes to her and eventually falls into some destructive habits like not going to work and eco-terrorism. Her defining characteristic, as told to us by many characters, is that she has a “one-track mind.” Yes. And prove it she does, many times. Now, I’m not suggesting that this book lacks actual serious concerns or that its literary value is thrown out the window because of sex, but this should act as a major clue about the attitude this book is presenting. This book is somewhat a parody of those erotic novels that lazily attempt some late-game feminism after 200 pages of sexual exploitation, but that’s not to say that this books fails at executing character development or that it’s not both fun and a serious attempt at understanding one’s approach to living, dying, and how to love.

That being said, the most common words I see reading reviews for this book are words like “wild,” and “bewildering,” and it reads at times like a dream, its behavior almost as surrealistic as its cover, major events coming fast at you with none of the usual sentimental preamble. It’s easy to make the mistake of trying to rationalize it--its as messy and volatile as life actually is. Its characters are hard to deal with, aggressively unlikable in an everyday sense yet intensely pleasurable in their humor, and many reviewers make the mistake of trying to legitimize Tiffany’s dubious behavior as somehow feminist. Any attempt at transforming Tiffany into a role-model of any kind is an act of absurdity so large that it would not feel out of place gracing the pages of this very book. Best to let these characters be themselves, here.

This book is definitely not going to be for everyone, and that one star reviewer has some concerns I may agree with (though I disagree with most). The NYT reviewer mentions that Zink got her start writing “impromptus” for her friends, and in a way this reads like a continuation of that: amusingly dirty, and filled with what must be satire of German environmental groups that only Zink and her pals would only really get. Maybe that’s some of the magic here--it’s wild, fun, personal, and doesn’t really give a damn if you get it. It’s complex enough that I feel this review didn’t quite do it justice in capturing its spirit, and it may require rereading for me to understand what it’s exactly trying to say, if it’s trying to say anything at all.

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

This is going to be one book from the Dorothy Project that I will not be finishing. It's described all over as a funny book and I'm sorry but it starts with a woman having a miscarriage and almost dying because her husband is a trying to find a bird? I just don't see the humor. This is not the book for me. I even kept going after that, but that was a mistake.

[Jenna Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this is one weird, fucked-up, compelling, funny, angry, sexy, twisted, intellectual little book. I don't know how she managed to get it published in today's world -- it's so offbeat and unclassifiable -- but I'm excited that she did. I couldn't really put it down. Really interested to see what Zink does next, too.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked its flighty sexy fun for the most part but also found myself against its caprice as idea/art. But then once I finished -- thanks to the end -- I started thinking about it as a contemporary feminist companion piece to Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter (oh, it's a moral tale about taking responsibility for yourself!) and knocked the rating up a bit. Franzen blurbed it for the birding and Berlin, and those bits -- the insider info on Germany/thereabouts and similes involving angry robins, trash birds etc -- make it singular but the tone is familiar, sort of like Grace Paley at her rangiest but shot through with way more sexy stuff. Insight, wisdom, and unpredictable turns of phrase and modulations throughout made it easy and enjoyable reading, but like a bird in flight it too often felt weightless, thanks mostly to incessantly ironic over-reliance on exaggerated analogy and the like. The eco-terrorist action seemed like a little engine to ease the burden of gliding along on language alone. A recommended beach read for readers who'd never read a conventional beach-read book.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Wallcreeper has been described as the literary version of Hausfrau, which I read some years ago, and pretty much loathed. Both books depict expat housewives with too much time on their hands, living in Switzerland. Both housewives are chronically unfaithful to their husbands.

I did not loathe The Wallcreeper, though. No, I didn't. I laughed out loud several times, reading it. I admired how each sentence is so very loaded. There exists a world in most of these sentences. But I also felt myself wanting it to be over. I wearied of its farcical tone, and how the author seemed to love to take a hatchet to things, without warning, to the point where I got the sense that it was almost arbitrary. That she didn't care about what happened to whom, and so why should I?

Zink paints an absurd picture of marriage (god, when Stephen and Tiff aren't having somewhat rapey anal sex in the kitchen imminently after Tiff suffers a concussion and miscarriage on a bird-watching excursion, they are sexing with pretty much every other person they come across) as well as eco activism. Yes, I know, an odd pairing. There are also a lot of birds featured, in addition to the wallcreeper. I was mildly entertained by this book, but I also feel an intellectual detachment that comes when being confronted by farce. I respect The Wallcreeper a lot more than Hausfrau, which was unoriginal and flaccid despite its attempts to the contrary. But I will easily move on from it.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know if I'm too prudish for this book, or not artistic enough, or if this really is just a terrible book. The characters are all unlikable (I think intentionally), there's a whole theme of birds and bird watching that does nothing for the main narrative, and, most importantly, the narrative is a build up to nothing. It ended and I was just happy it was over, I didn't care what happened to any of the characters. At least it was short.

[Fiona · Rating 2 out of 5]

Far be it from me to read what Jonathan Franzen tells me to read, but this was given to me by an in-law with notably good taste in books. He has not let me down.

This book is a much better book than I give it credit for. But I feel things deeply, and I like feeling things deeply, and this book does neither. It skips and hovers over things and never really pokes them too hard. It's worth reading, for sure but it and I were never meant to love each other.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about a twenty-something woman growing up late. Tiffany draws us in to her odd life on the power of her fresh and quirky way of looking at the world. It’s a fun, but confusing ride. In the end it’s only her writing of it that is admirable.

At the start we have she and her husband living in Berne, Switzerland, where he has transferred from the States to work in marketing for a pharmaceutical company. A collision of their car with a bird called a wallcreeper helps facilitate a growing interest of the couple in birding and nature. Aside from this common interest, there seems to be little holding their marriage together. They openly have affairs with other people. Still, she appreciates that he doesn’t demand that she work, and he continues to hope that she will bear them a couple of children. He cajoles her:
“I feed, you breed. Come on!”

She deflects him by speaking of the earth’s overpopulation and obfuscates the conversation by asking:
Admit it would help him get promoted
“What about global warming?”
“If it weren’t for global warming, we’d be under an ice sheet right now”. He gestured toward the mountains. “But look at us. Earth as far as the eye can see. I love global warming! And I love you!”
Something about the implied comparison made me nervous. I was pretty bad as wives go. Where Stephen was concerned possible epoch-rending, world-destroying bad. But without me he’d be under an ice sheet, so maybe I was doing him a favor.

Thus, we slip slide along with outwardly despicable people who charm us somehow with their honesty and verve. Tiffany’s boldness in seeking out vigorous sex partners has a bohemian flare. The way she looks at the world is jaundiced and wise in a zany way. For example, here is her deft summary of the city she is growing attached to:

Berne lived turned inward on itself. But it wasn’t self-sufficient; it was more like a tumor with blood vessels to supply everything it needed: capital, expats, immigrant, stone, cement, paper, ink, clay, paint.

Despite their open marriage, Tiffany periodically loves Stephen and isn’t about to give him up for another woman. She has such a comic way of turning a cold shoulder to the wife of one of his coworkers who wants her to help her get him:
“I can’t feel this trapped and survive. You don’t love Stephen, and I do.” Her hands were pressed against her heart and she was taking the feeling of emptiness there very, very seriously—a hole in her heart only Stephen’s dick could fill.

Soon their birding adventures lead them into the world of environmental activism. And more interesting sex partners for both of them. Stephen is led by his lust for a charismatic, ambitious woman to focus on large scale environmental efforts to rehabilitate the Rhine River, with a far-fetched goal of removal of all its hydroelectic dams . He takes up media work for with an outfit called the Global Rivers Alliance, attends endless conferences, and moves them to Berlin. Tiffany goes along for the ride, but at one more rural conference setting between Berlin and Leipzig she gets tuned into the fate of the Elbe River. An older Lutheran minister gets her interested in a more achievable goal of removal of the stone levees of the river, thereby allowing periodic flooding that will raise the water table and save an old forest.

Just when her interest in activism begins to grow, Stephen is beginning to feel ineffectual among the big league environmental players at his conferences and disillusioned with the whole scene:
They hate me. The only thing they think laymen are good for is to supply emotional arguments that might make somebody put up with nature. But they know it won’t work. Because if you have a plant you don’t like the looks of, or a bug that looks weird, you’re going to kill it, unless you’re a total sap. …Because nobody knows how the ecosphere works. It just wants to be left alone. Life is what happens when you leave it alone. It’s circular! But nobody wants to leave it alone. They want to love it. Love of nature is a contradiction in terms. It’s the thing everybody says nobody has enough of, and it’s this totally nonexistent personality trait. The myth of biophilia.

At this point I began to get disillusioned over the trajectory of the story. But by holding out a little longer, the plot careens into a significant resolution, and we get into a better position to forgive the two main characters for being such aimless idiots. I got a kick out of this fast kaleidoscopic read and its truly funny satire on the downside of sexual adventurism and on the environmental movement.

After writing the above, I went looking for information about the author and discovered an entertaining account of how this book came to be written in three weeks by the 50 year old author and sold for three hundred dollar. The article, Outside-In (New Yorker, 5/18/15, by Kathryn Schulz), also captures well her style of humor:
We think of being deadpan as playing it straight during comic episodes, but Zink stays deadpan through everything—through outlandishness, anger, injustice, grief.

[Natalie Draper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Narcissistic Tiffany's total apathy and the improbable Stephen delivered a bunch of snappy zingers at each other, screwed around on each other, did things that made no sense in any dimension, and then I didn't really care anymore, plus bird watching. There were some damn good sentences in this book though. Nell Zink could be a master of twitter. I went back and forth between liking it and total alienation from the story and characters.

[Jim Elkins]

Frantic Cleverness

Zink clamors for the reader's attention in every line, unremittingly, for an exhausting 150 pages. At times this works well. The opening pages are bound to be surprising, because there is not yet enough text to judge what she's up to. It works, as several of the hundreds of reviewers on Goodreads have noted, in the passage on anal sex, because it's unusual to see that subject treated to so many changes of viewpoint (pp. 7-8). But it does not work for the majority of the book.

Like any author, Zink has a limited repertoire of strategies for producing unexpected turns of voice, mood, and image. Her commonest strategy is to write a few sentences with a more or less consistent viewpoint, and then draw a conclusion that is unexpectedly skewed. For example this passage, which follows on the death of the narrator's pet bird Rudi:

"When Rudi died, Stephen stopped raising his eyes above the horizontal. He stopped going out at night or to the marsh [for bird watching]. He read every word of the newspaper, offering lengthy, cogent commentary on the financial news as if he had been asked to join the president's council of economic advisers. He enlightened me on the relations between oil-producing and -consuming states as if he were grooming me for a position on his staff. His personal interests were subrogated to those of the mass media, and he began to seem like a nearly normal person." [p. 45]

Note that the third and fourth sentences are structurally similar to one another. In Zink's prose, whenever two or more sentences reinforce one another, it's a setup. The end of the last sentence I've quoted here is the kind of reversal that would serve as a satisfying end to a chapter in a novel by, say, Henry James (especially given the Jamesian nuance "nearly"). But Zink's sense of surprise demands successive reversals. The next sentences (there is no paragraph break) are:

"He stopped shaking. He never got excited. When he went to bed his face turned into a slack, unhappy mask and he never looked at me before he closed his eyes."

So the narrator's newly politicized and oddly bureaucratically minded husband turns out to be unhappy, listless, and unaffectionate. At this point the reader is being asked to hope the narrator can cure her husband of his strange mourning over the dead bird: perhaps, it's implied, she can revive his interest in her. Then Zink provides another turn:

"Stephen's grief humanized him. I began to fall in love."

This kind of double or triple surprise could function well if it were used once or twice in a novel, but it is one of Zink's principal strategies for keeping the reader's attention. Viewpoints and conclusions shift with a regularity that sometimes makes them into tics, turning a reader's thoughts to the author instead of the narrator.

An even simpler strategy for holding the apparently easily bored reader's attention is changing subjects, images, and viewpoints as rapidly as possible. In this passage the narrator is looking out at Berne, Switzerland:

"Berne lived turned in on itself. But it wasn't self-sufficient; it was more like a tumor with blood vessels to supply everything it needed: capital, expats, immigrants, stone, cement, paper, ink, clay, paint. No, not a tumor. A flower with roots stretching to the horizon, sucking in nutrients, but not just a single flower: a bed of mixed perennials. A flower meadow where butterflies could lay eggs and die in peace, knowing their caterpillars would not be ground to pulp by the flowers. Continuity of an aesthetic that had become an aesthetic of continuity. That was Berne. I leaned against the city wall and Elvis kissed me..." [pp. 17-18]

First Berne is compared to a tumor, but the simile overspills itself, ending as a list of things that aren't related to the image. But that doesn't matter because the narrator cancels the metaphor, and tries the image of a flower; but in the next sentence that metaphor metastasizes into a meadow. Then comes the lovely but empty abstraction about aesthetics (how is it related to the flower metaphor?), and a blank assertion of the image's veracity ("That was Berne.").

It's always possible to argue that kaleidoscopic writing like this expresses the narrator's state of mind, but that is inevitably the case. The question is whether or not the author is in possession of other kinds of writing she can use to express other feelings, other situations.

I wouldn't argue that every novel needs to have a variety of paces (Bernhard and Beckett would be ready counterexamples), or that it is never a good idea to try to keep the reader's attention at every moment, line by line and image by image. Examples of books that do just that include, for me, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake; most of Mark Leyner; and much of Georges Perec. But Joyce also orchestrates changes in tone, voice, mood, and affect in different sections of the book; Leyner's anxiety about losing his reader's attention is his theme, fully acknowledged and made both ironic and pathetic; and Perec's strangeness is the result of self-imposed constraints, which themselves become objects of interest.

Here there is only the relentless drive to produce entertaining turns of phrase, striking images, clever tropes, and surprising reversals at all times, on every page and in every paragraph, with as little filler as possible, for the entire duration of the novel. The result, for me, is exhausting and, I hope, forgettable.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d been desperately eager to try Zink’s work but – now that I finally found a copy of one of her books at my new library – can’t think why. I liked the madcap birdwatching and ecoterrorism material, and there are some genuinely hilarious lines, but most of the characters seem to be here just to say some goofy stuff and then disappear once they’ve served their purpose. I could relate to Tiff’s sense of dislocation and purposelessness, but not at all to most of her decisions. Plus the sexual amorality really bothered me (“The world is not a better or worse place because you do or don’t screw around”). The plot is uneven throughout, but the wheels completely come off in the last 15 pages. Flouting the rules for how to conclude a novel is all well and good, but sometimes the rules are there for a good reason – to make something readable and believable.

Some great use of nature imagery:

“He then proceeded to dance as if he had never seen me, or any other human being, before in his life. Cranes came to mind.”

“The ospreys would have to take a back seat, because he and I were that most common of endangered species: adulterers.”

“At the funeral, I finally met [name redacted]’s mother. She looked at me with a hatred I’d only ever seen before on a caracal in the zoo.”

Another example of the wacky humor:

“Your mom told you to smoke weed?”
“No! She told me drummers smoke weed to keep from getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”
“I thought they did it because drumming is boring and monotonous.”
“It’s not monotonous if you smoke weed.”

[Ben Loory · Rating 3 out of 5]

a lot of sparkling writing draped over yet another miserable story about a married couple having affairs

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too "clever" for its own good (could use a healthy dose of "kill your darlings").

Almost became a case study on self delusion and futility. This was ruined by a too tidy and moralistic ending.

Hype is the enemy. I should know by now to not be seduced.

[Joanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not ashamed to admit I didn't get or like this book. A couple marries, is into birds, sleeps with everyone around them, is sort of into river ecology...I guess I'm not sure anything happened in this book. Worst part? The writing read like it was written for the approval of a creative writing teacher. Best part? It's really short.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bleak deadpan absurdity of the opening, and 10s release year put in mind of what I think of as "millennial surrealism" (the publisher Dorothy Project has put out some good examples like The Babysitter at Rest, or think of Alexandra Kleeman). I don't use that disparagingly, it's often a good mix of contemporary familiarity and stylization. This has that deadpan disaffected peculiarity veiling earnest dismay. However, though a debut, this harkens from an older lineage. It's hard to place an exact time period, could be the 90s, could be the present of its release if we overlook the lack of smartphones. Zink, a real American expat in Germany, teases autobiography throughout, but it's impossible to parse exactly. Instead, we get a conflicted sense of lived experience blurring with satire. Stephen and Tiffany 20-somethings in Europe on the edges of eco-activism, grappling with what they actually feel for eachother (often not much) and what they feel they should be doing (fixing the world if they could focus on it for a minute, or decide what would actually help, or stop confusing sleeping with other activists with helping the movement). I say satire, which all too often would annoy me in something like this, but it works because the plotting doesn't feel manipulative or driven by punchlines or messaging. Tiff and Stephen are all too believable in their foibles and flaws (and occasionally genuine terribleness) and they keep this very readable. That and the line-by-line off-the-cuff elegance of Zink's writing, which can load a word like "occasioned" with portent or have the epigramatic focus of an Elfriede Jelinek observation. The meandering uncertainty which the characters embody and which boosts the veracity also holds this back from fully developing momentum or culminating (it has a culmination, but it's an unexpected side-step) but it manages never to bore or to disintegrate into aimlessness.

[Hendrik · Rating 2 out of 5]

"… ein rasant erzählter Entwicklungs- und Eheroman …"

"… ein vor unerhörten Einfällen sprühendes, komisches, kluges, mitunter verrücktes, freches, derbes, engagiertes, impulsives, auch zartes, melancholisches Buch …"

Leider ist der Roman derart rasant erzählt, dass ich fünf Seiten später schon nicht mehr wusste was ich gerade erst gelesen hatte. Die Autorin versucht wirklich in jedem Satz eine Pointe zu setzen, was im Endeffekt dazu führt, dass der Text in seinem angestrengten Bemühen nach Originalität schlicht und einfach absäuft. Einige Stellen fand ich wirklich lustig, nur war meine Aufnahmekapazität nach kurzer Zeit im höchsten Maße überstrapaziert, um überhaupt noch lachen zu können. Dazu plappern die Protagonisten unentwegt wie ein Wasserfall. Chronische verbale Diarrhoe wäre meine abschließende Diagnose. Um dem oberflächlichen Dauergequassel wenigsten den Anstrich von ein wenig intellektueller Tiefe zu verleihen, wird exzessives name-dropping betrieben. Zahllose Anspielungen auf Schriftsteller, Bücher, Filme etc. spicken den Text. Trotzdem bleiben die Figuren absolut hohle und klischeehafte Abziehbilder. Weniger "unerhörte Einfälle", wären hier mehr gewesen.

[hearusfalling · Rating 1 out of 5]

I won’t bore you with a detailed summary of this book, you can google, it’s a simple enough story, basically the narrator Tiff is married, has a miscarriage, has numerous affairs, gets involved with her husband’s environmentalist excursions, has some more affairs, moves to Europe with said husband and tries to “find herself” or something … maybe it’s an indictment against the feminist project, whatever the fuck that is, regardless the narrator gets nowhere and is dependent on men throughout, even at the end she surrenders to a man, a denial of character arc that would be quite interesting and postmodern if this was 1974, but this is 2015 and this novel is largely shit. It’s good for an MFA grad in her early twenties but comparisons to DeLillo? come on now, settle down, the jokes are forced and the stuff about nature and the hypocrisy of environmental groups is trite, it moves fast, sure, and has a certain emotional glare, but purposelessness and existential ennui have been done better, and linked to nature, and by women too, see Anna Kavan.

The snappy and sharp style feels like someone trying to be snappy and sharp, it hasn’t got the natural poise or elegance to really convince me, there are so many moments where the joke is overcooked, unnecessary or forced.

Consequently Steven was physically revolted by her. As if her failure to notice what was going wrong with the planet was linked to a black, spongy degeneration of her brain that might be contagious.

The narrator’s fear of “self-actualisation” has the candid and confessional air of a blog post but I don’t think that’s a good thing, there are a lot of frank sentences about how lonely she is that feel straight out of the DFW school of feelings. (If you like reading blogs dressed as novels then you might like this however.)

There’s something kind of Lars Von Trier about the overall perspective of it, the love-hate relationship with nature, the meditation on the self’s engagement with the nature of nature, the pessimism with the idea of the body, her “breeding and feeding”, all that stuff about disgust being a perquisite for love.

“Birds are quantum,” he would say blandly.

Stuff like this makes it feel at times like the book is satirising itself, it’s littered with all these clumsy phrases that are trying to posture themselves as something profound, but end up feeling bland, kind of annoying and as needy and desperate as the narrator, “Tiff”.

Reading up about this novel afterwards, I realized who essentially got this book to where it is today in terms of praise and hype and the irony of this fact became clear, like the narrator of her novel, Tiffany, Zink was dependent on a man to give her what she needed, i.e. Jonathan Franzen. A man who hyped the book onto many 2014 best book lists, a man who gave up on Gaddis but Zink is the next DeLillo? Franzen’s cover blurb sums up my feelings exactly “Zink’s work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.” Indeed Jonathan, indeed …

[Julianne (Leafling Learns・Outlandish Lit) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The characters in this book are some weird, confusing assholes. The Wallcreeper is a strange tale about some pretentious weirdos who are married. Well, Tiffany married Stephen really quickly and then they kind of also explore extra-marital affairs, which is sometimes not a big deal but is other times a very big deal. They're kind of both lazily interested in a future together and furthering potential careers, but not to the extent that they aren't just floating around talking about birds one minute then quantum physics in relation to babies the next.

The structure is dreamy and weird. Tiffany and Stephen eventually turn into eco-terrorists. Their relationships get more complicated. But throughout it stays smart, witty, and really well written. Everything Zink writes is so on point. Her descriptions of sex, life, and death are all strange but super accurate. She's definitely talented and this book is definitely crazy. Zink captures how messy and volatile life and relationships can be, but it makes you grateful that you're probably less involved in eco-terrorism than they are.

Read more: 5 Quirky Books to Make You Feel Normal

[Dov Zeller]

This book does interesting things with prose and movement. As Warwick says in his gr review, Zink shifts gears a lot in one paragraph. That's exactly it. She shifts gears which creates a fascinating kind of movement and slippage (a wake or a vacuum), and there are brilliant, shining moments.

What Zink does with emotional geography is disconcerting and refreshing. She defamiliarizes the mundane and mundanes the outrageous and does so quite matter-of-factly.

The book itself as a whole I did not care about very much, but I am glad I stuck with it because of its sly idiot savance. Its emotional intelligence is a true human vacuousness exquisitely, excruciatingly rendered.

Below are some quotes from the text:

The opening sequence:

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage. Immediately obvious was my sticky forehead. Maybe I was unconscious for a couple of seconds, I don't know. Eventually I saw Stephen poking around the front of the car and said, "Jesus, what was that."

He leaned in at the window and said, "Hey, you're bleeding. Hold on a second." He crossed behind the car, looked both ways, and retrieved the bird from the opposite ditch.

I opened the door and put my feet outside, threw up, and lay down, not in the vomit but near it. The fir tops next to me had their roots at the bottom of a cliff.

"Can I use this bread bag?" Stephen asked. "Tiff? Tiff?" He kneeled next to me. "That was stupid of me. I shouldn't touch you after handling this bird. Can you hear me? Tiff?"

He helped me into the back seat and I lay down on the bread. He said head wounds always bleed like that. I said he should have kept quiet. I lost the ability to see and began to hyperventilate a bit. The car pulled back on to the road. From the passenger seat the wallcreeper said, "Twee."

...

Like birds nesting on the ground. How was I to know they’re so dumb they would build a nest on the ground under a tree, instead of up in the tree? So that when the foxes come, the baby birds are doomed. It gave the concept of the Easter egg hunt a sinister new meaning. Hungry little kids out wandering around after a long winter indoors, scanning the ground. (74)

Again, I cannot explain why being clasped in his arms and swum across the powerful river did not turn me on, except that it was George. He was not unknowable. No mysteries. Not even a lie. He was bubbly. He shopped for superficial new experiences and shared them. He lacked an event horizon. (85)

After the cranes had landed, the geese passed overhead in so many Vs that they merged into Xs and covered the entire sky like a fishnet stocking. My eyes turned damp. The harmless man smiled tenderly. (91)

I was desperately unhappy. I remembered the cranes and even the fog on the levee as though remembering the land of lost content. The Housman heaven: I see it shining plain, the happy one-way highways. And the Bialik heaven (as per T. Carmi): the distant islands, the lofty worlds we saw in dreams that evict us to dwell under the open sky (as absolute vagrants, seeking always those sunny days with a light fresh wind) and make our lives a hell. (100)

My misery was firm and unshakable. The old city of Berne was my natural habitat. It was where I felt at home, where I wanted to be. I didn't want to leave. Berne was where I could become most completely myself - possessive, shrewish, lonely. There was nothing to retard my self-actualization. (101-102)

My German was getting better, and I met people. I learned that I wasn't a feminist. Even men in their seventies, talking to me after meetings about an impending block party or the proper sorting of garbage, would raise their eyebrows when I said I had followed my husband from Philadelphia to Berne and then Berlin. I couldn't come up with a step I'd taken in life for my own sake. On my own behalf, to make myself happy, I'd done all kinds of things, all of them with the aim of staying close to a man. It hadn't occurred to me to be ashamed of myself. I'd thought love was a socially acceptable motivation. But to right-thinking Germans, I was a mindless whore, and historically I had never felt more normal than in the company of other mindless whores (e.g., Elvis).
I met someone who was the right kind of wife. Her husband played trumpet in a ska outfit whose contrabass player sometimes improvised to Stephen's minimal drive-by or whatever it was called that week. When I met her she had a kid on her shoulders and a baby on the ground at her feet, and she was talking gaily about India with a vendor of Indian junk at the flea market. The vendor was impressed, and I, too, was impressed. She was young the way an actual young person is young. Not like weary, defeated Stephen and me. She confirmed my suppositions about her sterling qualities as a wife by inviting me for coffee and serving a cake she had baked herself using yeast. I never did understand yeast.

Like me, she had moved to Berlin to be with her husband. The key difference was the kids. I envied her with a pang. An educated woman with little kids (I didn't imagine her having acquired them by any other means than hot sex) is a model of feminist, as well as feminine, virtue. Even her struggle to get strangers to take the kids off her hands is a feminist cause. Her work, bringing up the model citizens of tomorrow, is something society feels it ought to value and is constantly proposing as potentially eligible for pension benefits, unlike my work, which neither involved actual labor nor was anything but an end in itself, on good days, and otherwise not even that.
The next time we had coffee, she said she had been a Slavic languages major at an international program in Krakow and abandoned her studies when the first baby came. That was about nine months after Hermann's band played Krakow. She had barely remembered him, but she looked him up online. She hadn't planned to drop out, but it was absolutely impossible to be an adequate mother and have a life, she said. She didn't resent her children. She said they were every bit as interesting as verbs. (113-114)

His presentation was designed to promote tourism to the European Stork Village of Ruhstadt. The Ruhstadt storks nest on every available roof. When they return from Africa in March, they eat worms. Then they eat the town's plentiful frogs. They have kind eyes and patient smiles. Not just any town can become a European Stork Village (ESV). There is a strict evaluation process, and if the interests of, say, industrialized agriculture are put above those of storks, the town will be bounced right out of the program and its storks deployed elsewhere. But Ruhstadt valued its storks, which are fun for the whole family. The town was like a safari park, with storks climbing all over everything, catching mice, thrashing the life out of lizards, following cows around. It was like vacationing in the baboon enclosure at the zoo, except they had no thumbs and couldn't grab anything out of your hands and tear it apart. They were after other quarry. Human beings to storks were just a way of mowing the lawn, and nothing pleases them more than a whiff of decaying socialism. If you plot Germany's stork nests on a map, you can see where East Germany used to be, because it's where the storks are now. The ESV Ruhstadt, Olaf concluded, offers the ultimate in stork experience. The audience was free to infer its superiority to state government-approved SVs and the various other self-styled/consensus SVs that haunt self-published municipal media. Immediately after the talk, Olaf approached me and asked if I would like to go out somewhere for a drink. He didn't even take time to ditch the local chairman. He just herded me toward the coat rack. I said yes. (117)

To my surprise, Gernot looked at the ruined riverbank and was well pleased. Apparently it had never crossed his mind that sabotage doesn't look criminal if you get a young, middle-class housewife to do it. I looked like Jane Birkin in Slogan, if Slogan had been set in a scout camp in Poland. I worked the way Patty Hearst would have robbed banks if she'd never met the SLA. The militant wing of Global Rivers Alliance radiated innocent industry. If I have one talent in the world, that's probably it. Looking innocent enough to make whatever it is I'm doing appear legal. (137-138)

He brought up children again. While slurping a rum and Coke in bed, he said dreamily, "I wish I had fathered a child by accident so now I could find out about it. Like, some cute fourteen-year-old would show up demanding to be told the meaning of life, and she'd be our daughter I didn't know about. You have so many secrets, and my brain is like Swiss cheese, so why not?"

"It could happen," I said. "Perhaps not with me, seeing as how I would have noticed if I had a kid when I was sixteen. It's one of the advantages of being female. But maybe you have like six kids waiting to meet you in Philadelphia and three more in Tidewater, all lining up to collect child support. Maybe that's why you were in such a hurry to leave the country." (167-168)

I didn't know much about donkeys. My boarding school had a "coon-jumping mule," a term on whose origins I refuse to speculate, and I had ridden it plenty of times when we were giving the thoroughbreds a rest for whatever reason. It could jump over a four-foot fence from a standstill, like a jack-in-the-box. It had nothing in common with this diminutive stoic. With or without Stephen on its back, its pose was the same. Its general demeanor suggested that the burden of Stephen was no heavier than the burden of existence. On steep paths Stephen would dismount and hold fast to its mane, like a climber being short-roped by a Sherpa. It seemed strong as Godzilla. I named it Brighty.
Once I got used to the visuals, there seemed nothing odd to me about a rider whose sneakers almost dragged the ground. Stephen didn't use a saddle, just a folded blanket to keep donkey hair from working its way through his pants. I held the rope and carried our stuff in a backpack, and we fit right in. Albania is the West Virginia of Europe. Single mothers there dress and live as men.
I identified with Brighty. Her humble patience, her long-lashed eyes, the graceful way she picked out a route to nowhere with her tiny feet. We were one. Stephen told me where to go, and I led Brighty, on whom Stephen sat. A trinity. Three beings with a single will. I had never envisioned myself wearing a backpack larger than my torso and leading my husband through ancient live oaks on a donkey, wowing each village in turn like Christ's entry into Jerusalem, but then again, I never did have much imagination.
(173-174)

"When I tell my congregation there's more to life than food and sex, I'm just singing my song. From over their heads, like a bird in the pulpit, and people respond. No information changes hands, but it doesn't matter. Preaching really is like birdsong. If you find the melody, the fiction soars upward and joins the invisible truth. People respond to the truth in the lie. The way a bird responds when it hears its song. The males back off, and the females crouch down."

I frowned and said, "The females crouch down?"

He continued, "Tiffany, you must try to understand that it takes conditions of artificial scarcity to make satisfying basic needs seem beautiful. Our society works hard to make food and sex as scarce as beauty and love."
(187)

[Aloke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tricky to rate this one. I think even Zink herself has referred to this as “unpublishable”. But I kind of got obsessed with it.

It’s not deep but it’s very wide. It’s short and funny so I reread it to take another crack at some of the references. In fact it needs the references to work. (Even franzen didn’t get all of them according to that Dutch Zink interview) It also needs to be read quickly. The first time through I even missed some of the references to earlier events in the book. A book that needs a user manual can’t be worth five stars can it? But it left my head spinning in a good way.

My top 3 useful references to look up

Wallcreeper - the bird
St. Laurence
The definition of “Riparian”

Books the wallcreeper reminded me of

The Sellout (references and satire)
Tender is the night (Hapless Americans in Europe)
Spoof travel guides (Molvania)
David Sedaris’ diaries (punchlines)

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover quotes on ‘The Wallcreeper’ really talk it up, and rightly so for once. Nell Zink’s prose has an incredible clipped, ironic sincerity that is much harder to describe than it is to appreciate. Historically, I have been bored and irritated by novels about marriage, adultery, and couples deciding whether to have children, particularly if they were written in the last twenty years. Although ostensibly ‘The Wallcreeper’ ticks all these boxes, and features a main female character seemingly unable to exist without being married to a man, I loved it. Honestly, I’m not sure what happened. The writing reminded me a little of Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (which I also adored), although it is powerfully distinctive. Every page contains a quotable aphorism or remark. Samples:

"Once I moved out of my parents’ house, I calmed down a lot. I just didn’t like having people breathing down my neck."

That made sense. It would be a reason to marry someone too shy to ask personal questions. It was also a way of saying: I wasn’t doing drugs when we met and I’m not doing drugs now, but if you breathe down my neck, I’ll do drugs.

[...]

Our next stop was called Mancuso’s Loft. It was running drum 'n' bass. The proprietor waved us in. Here I saw Stephen through new eyes. Then I ran to the ladies’ room and stuffed my ears with toilet paper. Stephen led me to the floor and yelled, “I’m going to dance a little bit!” He then proceeded to dance as if he had never seen me, or any other human being, before in his life.

[...]

She stumbled along, obviously unused to explaining her actions or motivations to anyone and therefore making them as transparent as frog spawn. She wasn’t up to prevaricating with every word, the skill she so admired in Stephen. It takes a lifetime of practice. She had found her master, her teacher, too late. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

I greatly appreciated the satirical angle on environmentalism. I never thought I’d come across the Water Framework Directive in literary fiction.

The poster campaign hadn’t cost Stephen any real heartache. But once the money ran out, Global Rivers Alliance’s self-promotion migrated online, and to his sorrow, every single person who toyed with the idea of wiring two dollars to George first felt compelled to debate the merits of Wasserkraft Nein Danke with him. Most were themselves running tiny organisations that had arisen by spontaneous generation or mitosis. No one had supporters. Stephen spent hours writing closely argued defenses of himself and his aims. Each one is unique, because you can’t copy anything anymore without being caught. Rushed, because anyone who didn’t get an answer within fourteen hours would write again with more questions.

I also enjoyed the incredibly arbitrary and mocking literary references. Three favourites:

He was silent for three minutes, as long as the minutes of silence that pepper the conversations in Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.

[...]

“A life laid waste before it begins,” I said, quoting Stephen’s frequent references to the profoundly discouraging climax of the classic Icelandic novel Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

[...]

The sordidness of my reflections was dragging my mood through the cocoa powder, as the Germans say, and I recalled that the author of Philosophy in the Boudoir did not come to a good end, so I joined in the conversation. “I like birds,” I said.

I'm not sure what to think of the final paragraph. Is it too meta? I think Zink pulls it off. Apparently she wrote ‘a large section’ of this novel in four days. Incredible.

EDITED TO ADD: I posted this and then realised that I hadn't clearly stated that 'The Wallcreeper' is absolutely fucking hilarious. Surely I heavily implied as much? In any case, it really is.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this book, and delightfully so. Zink is hilarious, brilliant, and ribald. Found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion. Story itself slowed a bit towards the 2/3 point, but the whole thing was so ludicrously poignant, I couldn't help but be swept off my feet. I'm not even going to try and do this one justice. It has birds and infidelity, priests and politicians! It skewers everything from marriage to activism while still managing to resonate with human vulnerability.

This was a somewhat random pick when I ordered a number of books from Dorothy (the publisher). It's possible, I even thought I was ordering something by Kelly Link (whose name, unlike Zink's, I had actually heard of)---whatever serendipitous machinations put this book in my hands, I'm grateful.
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A FEW PHRASES NEW TO ME
Historia Arcana | aperçus | riparian
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If you'd like to read some Zink nonfiction (which is equally entertaining and smart), she wrote a recent piece about Dostoyevsky in the footsteps of Walser here: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/this-babushka-has-talons/

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't care about birds or riparian ecosystems or the sex lives of birdwatching ex-pats, but I loved reading Zink's sentences. A real savage, smirking wit lurks in these pages that is both delightful and erotic. That's two five star reads in two days set (partially) in Switzerland. I'm off to write my erotic thriller set at James Joyce's grave...

[mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

The wallcreeper is a rare bird that resides in central Europe. It’s similar to the American nuthatch, the Brown Creeper, with a similar voice “Twee v. “See,” and habits – they both search for food on vertical mass from bottom to top - moving upward. The bird, ‘Rudi,’ dies a quarter of the way through the story, eaten by a sparrowhawk after being rescued, nurtured, and then freed, by the heroine and her husband, Tiffany and Stephen, young nerdy, needy, Americans living and working in Central Europe. There is some political and ecological commentary; but mostly it’s a metaphor – for the author’s young female protagonist – a “mindless whore” who dwells and wallows in the mud and muck of human debauchery. Like the bird she’s only concerned with “breeding and feeding,” (yet self-aware) under the guise of love and work, having been “ordered and not picked up.” (As in take-out food.) “Somebody’s slam piece.”
There’s not much feeding going on here – it’s mostly about the breeding part. Our girl wonders if she has enough orifices to satisfy a man. This is a sad, sad story about a young woman with extreme lack of self-esteem (there’s no backstory); but written in a very hip, amusing, and subterranean clichéd (part of the hip-ness?) way.
I liked it. Not loved it, but liked it. It was different. A short (193 pages) novella about a lost young woman trying to find herself. It’s harsh & crude & cute –“Looking innocent enough to make whatever it is I’m doing appear legal.” Another metaphor. A wheel within a wheel – which phrase she uses, by the way. This is a genre, I think, that includes fiction and memoir summed up by Carolyn Seigneur’s 2000 novella, “The woman Who (Lost and) Found Her Wings.”
Fall 2014

[Siv30 · Rating 2 out of 5]

טיפאני נישאת לסטיבן חובב ציפורים מושבע וכל מה שהיא רוצה בחייה הוא לא לעבוד. היא מלווה את סטיבן במסעות הצפרות שלו בסופי שבוע ועוברת איתו מארה"ב לאירופה שם קיבל עבודה.

אבל הקשר בינהם שמתחיל במשיכה מינית אינו מתרומם ושניהם נסחפים לכיוונים שונים כשסטיבן הולך והופך לאקטביסט אקולוגי מושבע וטיפאני שנגררת אחריו מוצאת את עצמה לבד וחייבת להסיק מסקנות לגבי חייה ומערכות יחסיה.

טיפאני שנגררת בכל אירופה בעוני מרוד ונסמכת על טוב ליבם של גברים איתם יש לה מין מזדמן צופה מהצד באובדן המיקוד והדרך של סטיבן שמתמכר לסמים, למין מזדמן עם נשים שונות ומאמץ לעצמו מטרות שונות.

"הכותלי" מתחיל מצויין בתאונה שבה סטיבן וטיפאני מוצאים את הכותלי האומלל וטיפאני מפילה. הוא מתדרדר לתיאורי משגלים וזיונים עלובים ומתרומם לאקטביזם אקולוגי והעצמה נשית.

כל אלה בקצב מסחרר ולהגנות של הגיבורה שהשאירו אותי פעורת פה. לא תמיד הבנתי את הקשרים בעלילה אבל ממילא זה לא חשוב אפשר לקרוא גם בלי להבין.

אי אפשר לאמר שאהבתי את הספר. ממש לא. היו בו רעיונות מעניינים אבל הקופצנות והלהגנות הטביעו כליל את המסרים של המחברת ואת הביקורת החריפה שיש לה על הממסד, על הגופים האקולוגים ועל נשים.

[Sumaiyya · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink is supposedly about a (weird) couple who find a Wallcreeper in an accident which also causes the wife's miscarriage. The book is supposed to be about birding, eco-terrorism and the adulterous couple but frankly the sarcasm and snarky wit was lost on me and I got super bored and stopped reading. I've left the book unfinished, which I must admit, is an achievement because I rarely ever do that. I just didn't feel compelled enough to keep reading because I felt I couldn't connect to the point (if there was one) that the writer was trying to make. I think this book is a hit or miss but frankly I'm pissed off at the New York Times for its review of the book which led me to purchasing it last night. So yup, here's a book I'll only recommend to people I hate.

[Phee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Mislaid but this one was her debut I believe. I love the way Zink produces these awful characters that you can't help be invested in.
I think that when I read her other novels I will read the physical book along with the audiobook to help me comprehend the story better.