The Untameable Nell Zink

Hefty advances, millennial prudishness, her pen pal Jonathan Franzen—no subject is off-limits for the belated literary upstart.

- Boris Kachka

NELL ZINK HAS AN enviable problem. “I’ve been working hard to find ways to spend money,” she told me a few months ago over risotto in Princeton, New Jersey. Raised in Virginia and living in Germany, the suddenly celebrated 52-year-old novelist had been invited to give her only Stateside reading in the break between her second novel, Mislaid (longlisted for the National Book Award), and her third, Nicotine, which is out this week. Princeton was a pretty good place to spend Ecco’s $425,000 advance. “I blew a hundred bucks at Lululemon”—she wore a stretchy gray shirt with cutouts for the thumbs—“and like 60 bucks on books”—Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class—“and if I did that every day, let me think …” It would have taken seven years to blow it all on paperbacks and athleisure.

In addition to the advance for Nicotine, a careening VW-van ride of a novel occupied by a network of young anarchist squatters in Jersey City, Ecco paid another $25,000 to publish an early pair of novellas under the title Private Novelist (also out this month). Zink got only a $300 advance for her widely praised debut, The Wallcreeper, two short years ago. Most writers are loath to discuss their salaries; Zink clearly isn’t among them.

She still lives in the same bare studio in the town of Bad Belzig, an hour from Berlin, that she showed journalists who came to Germany last year to figure out how a middle-aged literary outsider who’d never lived in Brooklyn or set foot in an M.F.A. workshop had found her way into the literary Establishment. (She has not since swapped her futon for a proper bed.) Brazen enough to start a novel, as she does