Nicotine (ePub)

From the “wonderfully talented” author of Mislaid and The Wallcreeper comes a fierce and audaciously funny new novel, dazzling in its energy and ambition: a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her bohemian father's childhood home.

Recent college graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life—by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic “healing center.” And she's never felt particularly close to her two half-brothers from Norm's previous marriage—one wickedly charming and obscenely rich (but mostly just wicked), one a photographer on a distant tropical island.

Unemployed—and unmoored by her father's death—Penny decides to fix up her dad's childhood home in New Jersey. Instead, she finds it occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers' rights) and the other squatters in the neighborhood provide a sense of community and purpose that Penny feels she's desperately lacking, and she soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in the political fervor of her fellow squatters.

But the rest of her family has other plans—her mother and older half-brother would prefer to evict the squatters and gentrify the neighborhood. As the Baker family's lives begin to converge around Nicotine, Penny grows ever bolder and more determined to protect it—and its residents, specifically Rob, the asexual man with whom she's fallen irredeemably in love.

Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between idealism and pragmatism, between the have-nots and the want-mores, in a riotous yet insightful novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.