SISTER EUROPE

A motley assortment of the wealthy, the titled, and their attendants venture out into the Berlin night together.

With novels like Avalon (2022) and Nicotine (2016), Zink has demonstrated her love for outsiders. Sometimes, she creates characters who have been ostracized by others. Sometimes she creates characters who have chosen their own exile. Often, it’s difficult to tell which is which. While she typically writes about people living on society’s precarious edges, here she presents a cast of characters who are—mostly—set apart from everybody else by extreme wealth and privilege. Demian is an “in-demand freelance art and architecture critic” whose cushy lifestyle—including his career—is subsidized by his wife, a structural engineer. His 15-year-old daughter, Nicole, is fumbling her way through both adolescence and transition. He’s promised his friend Toto a “free Michelin-starred dinner in exchange for sitting through a one-hour literary-award ceremony.” Livia, also Demian’s friend, enjoys status and ease unmarked by her grandfather’s role in World War II. Radi is an Arab prince born and raised in Switzerland. All of them gather—alongside a woman Toto met online and a cop who thinks Toto is trafficking Nicole—to honor a renowned author, but they separate and pair off and reconnect over the course of one night. As ever, Zink is funny in a way that requires careful observation and precision. She exposes her characters’ weaknesses and shortcomings without being cruel or moralistic. For example, when Radi deadnames and misgenders Nicole, Zink lets Nicole handle it for herself. Overall, the night narrated here feels like the kind of time outside of time in which classical comedies take place—a liminal space in which characters experience transformations impossible in the everyday world. Here, some characters find each other, some find their way home, and some get a bit closer to finding themselves.

Zink is one of the most humane writers we’ve got, and one of the best.