Editorial Content for Sister Europe

With books like NICOTINE and AVALON, Nell Zink has a well-deserved reputation for fiction that often features less than lovable characters in more than unusual situations. That’s the case in her latest, SISTER EUROPE, the story of an oddly matched sextet (plus a poodle named Mephistopheles and a detective who stalks their movements) who wander through an extended evening in Berlin in 2023. While the novel has its bright moments and features Zink’s always flowing and often witty prose, the absence of real incident and the only vaguely appealing cast make reading it more of an effort than its barely 200 pages would suggest.

The action begins at a literary awards ceremony at a center city hotel for Masud al-Huzeil, an Arab poet and author of “magical realist fables.” The award is the creation of Naema, a “self-published conservative feminist philosopher” who married an emir at age 17, but who has lived in Montreux for nearly 50 years after the death of her husband. She can’t be bothered to attend the ceremony herself, so she dispatches her grandson, Prince Radi, as her representative.

"It’s possible to amble along through the Berlin streets, encountering some of the city’s famous landmarks with the group and enjoying their offhanded verbal byplay and the access Zink provides to their thoughts as she shifts effortlessly within the space of a single scene from one perspective to another."

Also present at the hotel is Masud’s friend, Demian, a freelance art and architecture critic whose wife doesn’t consider the event important enough to justify her attendance. At Masud’s urging, he invites his friends Livia, a landscape architect whose grandfather was a Luftwaffe ace in World War II, and expatriate American Toto, a failed archaeologist and musician who has lived in Germany since before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Toto drifts through various jobs that include packing stolen machine tools and car parts and later starts a press to produce cheap unauthorized celebrity biographies. “Life is all about raising expectations and seeing them crushed,” he believes. “Life is an excruciating phase in the life of everyone.” In his late 50s, he’s still on the prowl online for younger women. One of them, 24-year-old Avianca --- another American he’s nicknamed the Flake for all the times she’s stood him up --- has joined him this evening.

But the book’s most interesting character is its youngest: Demian and Harriet’s daughter, 15-year-old Nicole. She’s in the midst of a gender transition, a process that causes her father to waver between support and discomfort. She’s chosen this evening to pose as a streetwalker near the hotel, but after reflecting on her attire, she decides she’s “authentically a hot mess.”

Nicole’s activities attract the attention of Klaus, a plainclothes police officer “who took protection money from the pimps as though he were a gangster” and spends the rest of the night clumsily trailing her and her companions. After Nicole enters the hotel with Toto and Avianca, and meets Radi (who only makes a brief appearance at the awkward multilingual ceremony), Radi escorts Nicole to a seven-course dinner at its Michelin-starred restaurant as a prelude to what he hopes will be an eventual seduction.

Departing the ceremony after a disappointing dinner, Zink’s motley crew makes its way across Berlin on a cold, misty late February evening, seeking out an open restaurant and eventually landing at a Burger King. As a resident of the city, it’s a landscape she knows well, and it provides a suitably atmospheric backdrop for the evening’s aimless wandering and activities that include a brief stop that Nicole, Radi and Avianca make at an illegal electronic dance music club operating in an abandoned subway tunnel. “Berlin was an Eastern, a Russian, an Arab city, where a man had to be tough,” Radi muses, before a threatening character drives him and his female companions back into the night.

It’s possible to amble along through the Berlin streets, encountering some of the city’s famous landmarks with the group and enjoying their offhanded verbal byplay and the access Zink provides to their thoughts as she shifts effortlessly within the space of a single scene from one perspective to another. Where the novel falters is in its failure to provide any real drama or meaningfully engage our interest in the lives of these characters and their fates.

Radi fumes, suspecting that “the entire evening had been an unsettling, infuriating waste of his time,” as he reflects on an experience that was “beginning to assume mythical dimensions in his mind as one of the most irretrievably stupid nights of his life.” While that response would be an overreaction to this story, one leaves SISTER EUROPE with a sense of disappointment over how much more, in the hands of a writer of Zink’s gifts, it could have been.