Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a baggy monster realist novel. It moves from the subculture of straight edge punk to the backrooms of political powerbroking, and surveys ground from East Harlem to rural Ethiopia. There are at least half a dozen characters who take command of the narration for a substantial chunk of the story, and many more whose consciousnesses we breeze through as cameos. Yet the overall feeling isn’t of plenty, but of precarity. From the opening sentence, it seems that time is always about to run out.
‘Unknown to all, and for as long as he lived, Joe Harris was a case of high-functioning Williams syndrome,’ is how Nell Zink launches us into this world, immediately daubing the situation with mortality.
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