Mislaid : a novel /

TOWARD THE MIDDLE of Nell Zink's "Mislaid," a screwball comic novel of identity, Karen, a Southern white girl whose lesbian mother has raised her as black for complicated reasons, innocently asks a new friend, as though she were inquiring about her major: "What minority are you?" "Hispanic," her friend replies. "We've never done the genealogy, but you can tell by my name." In context, this is a laugh line, since the book has already answered, in a hundred ways, the question of what exactly is in a name: Nothing. Names mean nothing. They are labels stamped on mysteries, absurdly reductive and misleading. The same goes for racial and gender designations, which, in the book, are infallibly irrelevant to the highly individual business of living and loving according to our instincts rather than larger, social expectations. In "Mislaid" everyone is a minority - of one. The action begins in 1960s Virginia, a place and time of settled categories and an appropriate launching pad for a story that breezily seeks to upend the order of things. Peggy, the daughter of stuffy, stoic parents, enrolls at Stillwater College, a school for women whose most prominent faculty member is Lee Fleming, a son of the local gentry and a poet. Sexually, Peggy prefers girls, and Lee most definitely fancies boys, but something fluid in their personalities permits them to love each other, for a time. It helps that the isolated, bucolic college, set on the shores of an artificial lake, allows for a pastoral approach to romance, turning its denizens into nymphs and satyrs wont to gambol in the leafy shade. Lee is a lord of misrule in this respect; his traditional old pile of a house functions as a hostel for visiting writers seeking intoxication and release with the aid of psychedelic drugs, which are always in supply, along with lots of booze. Peggy steps into this whirlwind, ends up pregnant, marries Lee and soon enough is impregnated again. That the marriage will fall apart is understood - just too much built-in dissonance - and eventually it does. Zink's narrator is a knowing, omniscient figure who speaks directly to the reader while floating anonymously above the story, offering sharp observations and mordant commentary and smoothly moving things along in the manner of novels from an earlier century. "At heart he knew he was normal," the narrator says of Lee. "No more conflicted than any other married man. He was a sexual being. He couldn't give that up on account of a three-month fling with his wife 10 years before. Like many a married man before him, he took the deal they had hammered out - you give me your life, in return you get my kids - and canceled both ends. He didn't want to be privy to her martyrdom, and he didn't like her influence on his kids." This lost mode of storytelling, updated by Zink, imbues the book with an elegance and confidence that are exceptionally rare now, and most welcome. Instead of the crabbed, neurotic tone that one might expect when treating such loaded material, she skips along with ease and clarity, summarizing, compressing and encapsulating, unflappably wise and in control. When Peggy finally leaves her husband, afraid that he'll commit her to a psych ward for various acts of dramatic exasperation (including driving their car into the lake), she takes their daughter but leaves their son behind, setting the stage for a latter-day fairy tale thick with misunderstandings and coincidences, concealments and revelations. Rigging up the machinery of this plot consumes a lot of narrative energy and asks us to suspend our disbelief to greater and greater degrees, changing the book from a comedy of manners into an outright comedy of errors. Peggy moves into an abandoned house in a historically black rural settlement and gets her hands on a dead child's birth certificate, which she uses to conceal her daughter's past. She renames herself Meg and her daughter becomes "Karen," who, per the stolen certificate, is black. "Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people," the helpful narrator chimes in by way of quieting readers' skepticism. "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. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: If one of your ancestors was black - ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah's son Ham - so were you." Having reduced the matter of race to an absurd and antiquated legalism, Zink proceeds to show us how Karen's new arbitrary classification affects her developing sense of self. It doesn't much, as it happens. Instead, her putative blackness warps the reactions of those around her, particularly at school, where the patronizing powers that be lavish her with self-serving affection, complimenting themselves for their own tolerance and treating her as an exemplary specimen of the supposedly colorblind New South. An angrier, more politically minded novelist - a novelist more like the Zink who gave vent to her environmental frustrations in her previous novel, the appealingly anarchic debut "The Wallcreeper" - might have taken another tack, visiting upon Karen all sorts of insults, but because Zink's concern here is human folly, she focuses on the humorous disparity between Karen's rather contented inner life and others' conviction that she needs their help. Race is not in the skin, apparently, but in the eyes of the beholder. TO DRIVE THIS POINT HOME, Zink gives Karen a best friend who was born black but doesn't act that way, whatever "that way" is thought by many to be. Temple is a nerdy, earnest dreamer, his thoughts and emotions borne aloft on rarefied, literary wings. When his academic aptitude earns him a full scholarship to the University of Virginia, the admissions committee worries that he'll drop out unless Karen, his girlfriend, is admitted with him. Meanwhile, Byrdie, her long-lost brother, raised by Lee as an epicurean libertine and bona fide member of the Caucasian overclass, has already enrolled in the same school. This odd situation's farcical unraveling harks back to Elizabethan comedy, and Zink exploits its potential with zany verve. The problem is that, in contriving her grand finale and systematically playing against type as she sketches her swelling cast of characters, her hold on the story loosens somewhat. The impersonal exigencies of plot overwhelm the novel of sensibility, and suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by a crowd of familiar Southern eccentrics on an over-determined collision course. Piquancy and intimacy are lost, sacrificed to momentum and high mayhem. The damage isn't fatal, though; the novel's charm and intelligence run deep. It's a provocative masquerade with heart, not just an exercise in role reversals, reminding us that the gaps and cracks between our insides and our outsides are the spaces where our spirits live. 'Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people.' WALTER KIRN is the author, most recently, of "Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade."

In Zink's second novel (following The Wallcreeper, named one of the best books of 2014 by PW), a gay man and a gay woman meet at Virginia's Stillwater College in the 1960s, marry and have children, and eventually separate-it's a deceptively slim epic of family life that rivals a Greek tragedy in drama and wisdom. The mother, Meg, goes on the lam, taking the identity of a deceased black girl for her daughter, Karen, to start a new life in the rural South (Meg tells the community that she and her daughter are of African-American lineage, though they are white), while her son, Byrdie, remains with the father, Lee. Years later, the kids' paths cross in a confluence of events at the University of Virginia. The novel deftly handles race, sexuality, and coming of age. Zink's insight is beautifully braided into understated prose that never lets the tension subside; the narrator's third-person voice is wry, and the dialogue is snappy. In one scene Meg reflects on how she'll raise Karen in her new identity: "Children have no hearts [...] and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus." The various ways the characters' memories and motives affect the action is frequently "mislaid," from the inciting relationship to the far-flung situations in which the characters find themselves-it all points to Zink's masterly subtlety and depth. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A number of works of fiction lately have touched on the topic of a white person living with another racial identity, including Jess Row's Your Face in Mine, Reif Larson's I Am Radar, and this latest from Zink (The Wallcreeper), all of which seem particularly prescient in light of the recent Rachel Dolezal controversy. In this case, 1960s lesbian teenager Peggy marries her gay college poetry professor after getting pregnant, then runs away with her daughter, adopting African American identities for both of them. That mother and daughter are blond-haired and white is explained in the book by the "one drop" rule, and the hardships and challenges she and her daughter face as "people of color" figure prominently in the story. VERDICT The setup and book jacket seem to promise an outlandish satire, but the story itself is chilly and lackluster; Cassandra Campbell's narration is pleasant but does nothing to enhance the ostensible humor of the story (which this reviewer found to be utterly lacking). At least there's a happy ending. ["Crafting a zany story with outlandish characters doing the unexpected, Zink successfully creates a comedy of errors offering a happy ending for an impossible situation": LJ 4/1/15 review of the Ecco: Harper-Collins hc.]--Victoria A. Caplinger, -NoveList, Durham, NC © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

New novel from the critically acclaimed author of The Wallcreeper (2014).It's 1965. Peggy Vaillaincourt is a first-year student at a tiny women's college in Virginia. The fact that she's a lesbian doesn't stop her from falling into an intensely physical affair with Lee Fleming, Stillwater College's most famousand most famously gayfaculty member. Their relationship leads to a pregnancy. This pregnancy leads to marriage, and the marriage leads to another pregnancy. Eventually, Peggy leaves, taking her daughter but not her son. And, as she starts her new life, Peggy decides to pass as black. This is an ambitious premise, one that seems poised for an interrogation of race, sexuality, and social class. What Zink delivers isnot much of anything. The novel reads more like an outline for a story than the story itself. To cite just one example: "She was feeling new feelings, emotional and physical, new pains and longings, and she couldn't make notesbut she kept careful track of them, mentally." Zink offers no description of the precise nature of these "pains and longings." She merely mentions that they exist, which, given the context, could probably go without saying. It would be surprising if Peggy's discovery of sexwith a man, no lessdidn't provoke "new feelings." This is typical of the novel as a whole. It's not necessary, of course, for a protagonist to be introspective and insightful, but it's a problem when the author herself seems not terribly interested in her creation. Zink's lack of curiosity about her characters and the connections between them seems especially odd because notions of identityhow we see ourselves, how others see usare such a significant feature of her very baroque plot. A promising premise rendered in dispirited, disappointing prose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.