LIKE THE WALLCREEPER and Mislaid, Nicotine is not sweetness and light, but it is funny. Our main character, Penny Baker, is the daughter of a celebrated anthropologist who adopted, in a way, then eventually married a young orphaned girl from a South American tribe he was studying. When her father dies, this dodgy situation reveals whole new and possibly even dodgier angles, so Penny decides she needs to get away for a while.
One of the questions that has come up after her father dies intestate is what to do with his childhood home, which the family still owns. Checking out the house, Penny discovers it is inhabited by a colorful group of squatters, who have named their community “Nicotine,” since they are all tobacco users.
Penny’s relationships with the community and certain of its members deepen intricately over the course of the novel, especially once her unscrupulous shark of an older half-brother conceives of a grand gentrification project around the house and becomes erotically obsessed with one of the members of Nicotine.
Does it all work out? I would say so. But the novel’s main treat is Nicotine. The only other novel I have read set among squatters is Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, and this one had a livelier representation of the world and culture—funnier, too, but also a shade more vraisemblable, perhaps.
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