Mislaid

Nell Zink is a very funny and intelligent person, and you could do much worse than spend several hours of your life in her company, or at least in the ersatz form of it offered in her latest and second novel, Mislaid. This book, which has been positioned by everyone from The New Yorker on down as representing Zink’s triumphant ascent to the hallowed status of Established Literary Writer, is hard to describe. It’s something like a satire of rural Virginia spread across forty years, with drive-by hits on everything from racial identity to the uselessness of poetry to the crappiness of all parents, everywhere.

The book has the sort of velocity that it needs to cover such wide territory: Mislaid has a magic carpet quality, lifting you soundlessly and then carrying you swiftly to its end without your even feeling the wind ruffling your hair. The lack of that ruffling may be a problem, but I’ll get to that.

First, the good stuff: the cast of characters who populate this novel are delightful in their near-total lack of smoothness or perfection. And happily their eccentricities never quite harden into that dreaded word, quirk. Peggy Vaillancourt, the college student who starts us off, discovers that she is a lesbian but somehow ends up marrying the school’s male gay poetry professor anyway. This could be the mislaying of the title, but then so could it be some reference to the way that nearly everyone in this novel ends up putting aside the lives that others intend for them, or they intend for themselves. Lee Fleming, the poetry professor, is the wayward scion of local rich folk; Peggy never manages to become the playwright she wants to be. Their children are both drifters of a kind, too, unable to articulate some clear sense of themselves in the wake of a childhood split down the middle. Because early in the book Peggy runs away with the couple’s daughter, Mireille, gives them both assumed names and black racial identities, and leaves the son, Byrd, with his father.

If you find yourself pulled up short by the notion that a white character is able to successfully pass herself off as black, of course you’re meant to be. But the conceit is well defended in the novel by way of a critique of racial classification laws: “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green.” So Zink couches her demand that you suspend your disbelief, by way of pointing to the ridiculousness of a country whose sorting was based on a literal “one-drop rule.”

It takes fancy footwork to be able to guide a contemporary American reader, usually one well steeped in debates about identity politics, through conceptual thickets like these in a book. But Zink has the chops for it, and mostly the maneuver is accepted for what it is: a criticism of those people who think identity categories are rigid and inflexible, that they are untouchable as subjects and that no one should write about them. If anything Zink makes her disdain for that kind of politicking very explicit. Midway the novel Lee finds himself with a class full of third-wave feminists wanting to turn his quiet poetry journal into a vehicle of female liberation. Zink’s joking, which until then has been light and gentle, then takes on the sharpness of pure caricature:

The Maoist looked up. “Lee, if you’re alluding to your homosexuality, the notion that homosexuality is less patriarchal than heterosexuality has been conclusively disproven. Gay culture is based on male bonding . . . “

And so on. This kind of academic send-up is funny enough — but it isn’t playing at the same level as much of the rest of the book. Zink is a writer whose grasp of human psychology is firm enough to be able to explain that her main character is “self-centered” but also that she was “a shallow smartass brimming with fierce, self-sacrificing maternal feelings, saddled with a passion to be loved that no one had seen but Lee.” In moments like those, when the Zink-in-the-text really comes out and shows that she can level emotional heft with sardonic observation this easily, the novel feels briefly exhilarating.

But then the breeziness, and its curses and benefits, returns. Mislaid ends in farce, mirroring, as others have noted, a certain Shakespeare comedy. (Revealing precisely which one would give away too much of the plot.) It feels oddly like a premature departure — as if the novelist herself has become impatient and wants to get out of our way. In her next book, one hopes she’ll linger a little longer.