Nell Zink’s zany yet unexpectedly moving third novel, Nicotine (Ecco, $26.99), named for a house of squatters working to further smokers’ rights (many smokers have a “medical need” for tobacco to keep their mania and/or depression under control) loosely traces several decades’ worth of alternative lifestyle movements, from the last gasp of the late ‘70s hippies to the early twenty-first century identity-politics activists. Along the way, Zink, with her inimitable blend of realism and absurdity, sends up the witting and unwitting contradictions of hospice care (which allowed “no painkillers because they hasten death, and no fluids because they prolong life”), faith (a former Italian Jew who converted to shamanism professes not to “believe in god,” but he does “believe in religion”), and social activism, which can devolve into interchangeable issues and be more about slogans than people. Most of all, Zink targets family, and her protagonist, Penhana “Penny” Baker, has a highly unconventional one, from her New Age father, his much younger, South American Indian wife—who is also his adopted daughter—and her two older half-brothers, one of whom may be her real father. Is this clan dysfunctional, or has it liberated itself from such constraining notions? Zink satirizes both sides, playfully exposing the conventions of the unconventional and the lengths we go for the sake of a cherished self-image.