With ‘Doxology,’ Nell Zink Delivers Her Most Ambitious and Expansive Novel Yet

Pamela goes into a funny monologue about the weird confluence between Todd Rundgren (“Todd is God,” she says), John Lennon and Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s assassin. Daniel stares at her and thinks: “It was a kind of knowledge he didn’t expect a woman to have, much less care enough to say something post-sensitive about.”

Post-sensitive is not a bad description of Zink’s Weltanschauung. Her women tend to be the sort of people for whom, as the old joke has it, there was no Santa at 6, no stork at 9 and no God at 12.

Her previous novels include “The Wallcreeper,” “Mislaid” and “Nicotine,” and I’ve admired many aspects of each of them. “Doxology” puts her on a new level as a novelist, however. This book is more ambitious and expansive and sensitive than her earlier work. She lays her heart on the line in a way she hasn’t before.

Daniel’s day job is through a temp agency. Zink charts the nature of this sort of work through the tech revolution; she probes the inequities of outsourced labor. Pamela is a computer programmer. They live in an illegal apartment on the Lower East Side and, somewhat accidentally, have a daughter they name Flora.

The World Trade Center falls. Zink writes about Lower Manhattan as well as she does about everything else. About the wind down there, she says: “In a culture given to self-mythologizing, that wind would have had a name, like the Mistral or the Santa Ana. In the financial district, it was weather.”

With fear and asbestos in the air — Pamela and Daniel “behaved like two cats hit by separate cars” — Flora goes to live for a while with Pamela’s parents, who lead a very comfortable middle-class life in the Cleveland Park section of Washington, D.C. These are the same controlling parents that Pamela, a tough-stemmed flower, ran away from home to escape and did not speak to for many years. With time, everyone has mellowed.

Flora blossoms in D.C. All sides agree she should go on living there. It’s among this book’s mysteries why Pamela and Daniel let their daughter go so easily, but that’s a mystery we can chew on at another time. This book slowly becomes Flora’s.