FictionReviewZink has broken into the American literary scene late in life with a lot of fanfare – and this novel, about a woman on the run from her marriage, lives up to the hype
Odds are you may not be in extraordinary need of an article recommending you pick up a book by Nell Zink. A lengthy profile in the New Yorker is only the latest in a long series of news stories and book reviews occasioned by the rapid one-two punch of this American expatriate’s first two published novels: The Wallcreeper (which was published late last year in the US to immediate acclaim), and Mislaid (which is out everywhere this week). The author’s unlikely rise certainly makes for more-entertaining-than-usual literary shoptalk; if you still need the professional précis, do check out one of the interviews. But none of that winning backstory would mean anything if Zink’s work were to collapse under the weight of our collective scrutiny. And her work holds up.
She takes thrilling narrative shortcuts in order to make space for her characters’ oracular and erudite disquisitions – while also dispensing with many of the supposed requirements of the “literary novel” (like portentous foreshadowing and “consistency of tone”). In the space of a page, Zink readers should expect to learn of a character’s progressive engagement with Dylan Thomas, Prince, and Samuel Beckett. We should also be ready for seemingly important male characters to die off suddenly, with a lack of emotional affect that would likely impress Sartre or Camus, both of whom are also referenced in Zink’s new novel. (The Wallcreeper: “And at some point after that, he was dead.” Mislaid: “Two hours later, he was dead.”) And while Mislaid may claim fewer jokes per page than Zink’s debut – this novel is written in an omniscient third person that surveys the minds of multiple generations of characters, necessarily abandoning some of the focused delights of The Wallcreeper’s first-person-badass sound – it is the bolder and more memorable fictional creation.
The plot’s broad strokes are the stuff of comic opera, updated for the 20th-century American south. In Mislaid’s opening pages, we meet an awkward lesbian student who is impregnated and married by a gay poetry professor in a 1960s college setting. (The novel’s title is an editorial comment on their misbegotten coupling.) When the flavour of their domesticity turns from sour to liberty-threatening (and not before a second child arrives on the scene), the young woman takes off with one kid (her daughter), and goes to ground in a nearby location. For cover, the mother and the child adopt new names and African American identities, and accept the trappings of poverty as a fictive corollary (the better to avoid detection from the local power structure, which is on an urgent hunt for two missing white women). Meanwhile, the son of the dissolved couple is raised by his father, with all the trimmings of privilege.
Obviously, the narrative strands are going to collide. Obviously, before that occurs, the book all but taps you on the shoulder to suggest that you might dispute its plausibility. (It’s not until page 200 that one of the story’s “real” African American characters, regarding the mother-daughter duo, thinks: “Black my ass.”) But it’s precisely by giving readers a new and outlandish tale – one that strays well beyond the borders of so-called “realism” – that Mislaid becomes surprisingly affecting. At many junctures, we don’t know who’s been wronged more. And I suspect that’s the point. Whereas the The Wallcreeper was best enjoyed as a madcap feminist bildungsroman (complete with epiphanic statements like: “I am through being people’s sex slave! I want to study organic forestry,” or: “I had been treating myself as resources to be mined”), Mislaid is more interested in complicating our sympathies.
Take the the character of the mother (variously named Meg or Peggy). She is clearly a victim of patriarchy and heteronormative attitudes. She deserves an escape – but at the cost of harming both of her children? It’s less clear. To further futz with our feelings, Zink often gives us both sides of the argument on the same page. At one point, the omniscient narrator intrudes:
Here a person might ask: Was Meg self-centered or what?
Then the writer then deposits a hard-return into the text, before removing all doubt:
Meg was self-centered.
Nor does this clarity preclude a thorough explanation of how someone like Meg would come to rationalise such radically selfish choices: “Weeks of unrequited lesbianism; willing submission to a teacher who ran circles around her socially, intellectually, emotionally; marriage to him. For comic relief, visiting poets and two introverted kids. Would any sane person expect a life like that to result in a warm, affective personality? Meg was a shallow smartass … She knew she was ridiculous. That’s why she expressed her love for [her daughter] through irony.”
Likewise, Meg’s onetime husband Lee – by turns emotionally abusive and neglectful, not to mention unfaithful – is painted both as a monster as well as a magnet for our empathy. On the one hand, we may wince when his claim to minority status is too zealously vacated by a band of second-wave-inspired feminist students. But by the time a fellow gay friend admonishes Lee not to complain overmuch, given the coming fall of the American empire and all, we may be inclined to agree. (“Dammit, Lee. You bullshitted your way into the last of the bullshit jobs,” the pal says to the poetry professor.)
It would be easy for passages steeped in such knowingness to curdle into a work of literature that’s more grimly impressive than it is joyfully immersive. So it’s a delight to find that, ultimately, the kids of Mislaid come out a little less damaged than their parents. Like Zink’s own writing style, they’re too hip to the sins of the past to fall back on easy political characterizations and assumptions, and too witty to be depressed for very long.
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