If you are partial to the pedantic musings of precocious English majors and the stuttering inertia of young people emerging from sad and loveless childhoods, you might really like Nell Zink’s new novel, “Avalon.”

It’s a bildungsroman (this is the kind of word Zink might like) starring our exceedingly passive protagonist Brandy, whose mother left her in the care of her “common-law stepfather” to become a Buddhist nun. Brandy, or Bran, as she’s called in the book, grows up as a source of free labor, clothed in her “common-law” brother’s old flannels and sleeping in a lean-to off the kitchen at a sketchy nursery-cum-biker-hangout in Torrance (Los Angeles County).

When she meets her similarly ostracized but rich best friend Jay in middle school, her world begins to expand a little, first to the high school literary magazine they edit with a growing group of more fortunate friends, then to UCLA, where Jay goes to study “critical dance studies” and Brandy goes to visit.

Zink is a brilliant creator of character, setting and, for lack of a better word, vibe, and there is much pleasure to be found in the way she gets so many things so precisely right in this novel, from the hippie-outlaw-libertarianism of Brandy’s plant-tending biker-gang ersatz family to the artistic strivings of film school students who label nearly everything “fascist.” It’s well-observed, archly funny and, unfortunately, a bit bland as a whole. As Brandy says while reading a book given to her by her relentlessly academic love interest, Peter, “I had never read a book so rigorous and mundane.”

While Zink has lots to say about class, art, aesthetics and growing up, the story is nearly nonexistent. There is the desperate young love between Brandy and Peter that is never to be, and the often frustrating attempts by Brandy, and everyone who knows her, to get her out of the exploitative and impoverished “home-life” of the nursery. But it’s hard to see what Brandy loves about Peter, an ineffectual scholar engaged to another woman, and it’s unsatisfying to witness the very low expectations she has for herself. At one point her plan to escape her past involves sleeping in her car in a local park while hustling for landscaping work. This is a young woman with friends at fancy universities and rich people willing to help her.

Eventually, based on the suggestions of Peter and Jay, she settles on becoming a screenwriter, although she has shown no previous interest in either writing (save the high school literary journal) or movies. She writes some well-received scripts for Jay’s student films and some dystopian spec scripts, and then, well, we don’t really know what happens because the novel ends. It hints at possible romantic and artistic fulfillment, but that might be too predictable for these characters, too fascist a concept for this lot of self-appointed arbiters of authenticity. But one can hope.

Avalon
By Nell Zink
(Knopf; 224 pages; $27)