Mislaid
Nell Zink
Harper Collins
2015, pp 242, Rs. 1,482
Early in Nell Zink’s second novel, Mislaid, a young wife drives her husband’s beloved car, a VW Thing, into a lake and walks away. As it sinks, it makes a sucking sound. He’s a poet. They live near a college campus in Virginia. It’s the late 1960s. When the campus security officers show up, this bit of dialogue ensues.
College cops: “Mrs. Fleming, are you saying that was not an accident?”
Her: “Nope. That was theatre of cruelty.”
Nearly all the dialogues in Zink’s two novels are salted this way. Reading her can be like sitting in the front row at a Tracy Letts play. Zink has a gift for absurdist scenarios as well. The poet is gay. His wife is a lesbian. Thus this book’s title is a little battery of charged meaning.
Zink is a wonderfully talented writer. Her first novel, The Wallcreeper (2014), set mostly in Switzerland, was a small and absurdist riff about bird watching, free love and ecoterrorism. Most of its best bits are unprintable here. But when a husband asks his wife for a baby, she snaps: “Sounds tempting. If I could lay eggs and you agreed to sit on them, I might even do it.”
The Wallcreeper had brilliant threads, and it made me laugh out loud. It was clearly the work of a fine, demented mind. It had a screwball authority, as Philip Roth once said of a Saul Bellow novel. But it was limited. It was something closer to a performance piece than a novel.
The thrilling early sections of Mislaid find Zink writing on a higher plane. Her prose is richer, earthier, more emotionally complex. She gives us the story of Peggy Vaillaincourt, a proper Southern girl — her father is the chaplain of a girl’s boarding school — who discovers early on that, inside, she is a boy. Her friends flee, calling her a ‘thespian’.
In college she meets a famous poet, Lee Fleming, a gay man from a distinguished Southern family. He lives in a grand old creaky house across a lake from the campus and bought by his father for this reason: “He imagined muscle-bound tea boys doing bad things to Lee, and he didn’t want passers-by to hear the screaming.”
Improbably, Peggy and Lee have great sex. More improbably, they fall into something that approaches love. They marry when she gets pregnant. Something about this unusual setup reminds me of a line from Zink’s first novel, in which her female narrator comments, “I generally based appraisals of my affections on the momentary condition of my genitalia.”
Zink has a feel for this material — for the South, for class details, for the inside of Peggy’s ambitious but confused mind. The author’s deadpan humour has not been switched off. Reading the first third of Mislaid can be like reading a Donna Tartt novel if Tartt had taken a night course in sweet brevity.
Yet by its midpoint, Mislaid has begun to misfire. It grows antic. Too much happens, but somehow not enough does.
Fearing that Lee will put her into a psychiatric institution after that stunt with the car, Peggy flees with her daughter, Mireille, in the couple’s candy-apple-red 1966 Ford Fairlane. They also have a son, Byrdie, whom she leaves behind. She paints the car black. Mother and daughter vanish. “Being a lesbian,” Zink writes, “had given her practice keeping secrets.”
She and the girl move into an abandoned cabin in the swamp. Peggy gets a crew cut. They both adopt new identities, and not just any ones. They decide to pass as African-American.
Zink gets some rich social comedy out of this conceit. “Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people,” she writes, explaining the one-drop-of-blood rule. The racist white mothers think about Peggy: “She was so delightful and approachable! A natural ambassador of the newly ascendant educated black middle class.”
About her daughter, we read: “The ghostlike, flaxen-haired black child was almost a matter of civic pride. They hoped she would stay in the county and marry a light-skinned, blue-eyed man to found one of those conversation-piece dynasties.”
Watching Zink absorb this heavy racial freight into her relatively slim novel, though, is like watching a snake unhinge its jaws in an attempt to swallow a portable generator. The snake gets it down. But it never manages to digest it, and no nutrients are derived.
Mislaid loses its centre of gravity in other ways. The first half of the book is fundamentally Peggy’s story. She becomes, in her search for meaning and love, dear to us. It’s painful, watching her get worn down like beach glass.
She’s no angel. Zink writes, “What kind of monster leaves her little son and never even sends a postcard?” But she is real, plump with meaning and promise. You feel she is on her way to becoming an important character in recent Southern literature, Harper Lee’s Scout grown into something ambiguous and unruly. But in the book’s second half, the narrative begins to skip around unpredictably, to Lee’s life as well as the lives of the two children. The novel hits odd digressions as if they were potholes. Years flip quickly past. Peggy recedes.
Mislaid loses its focus, and its grip on us. The last sections — involving the University of Virginia, LSD, possible date rape, an absurd courtroom scene and an improbable family reunion — are expedient, farcical in all the wrong ways. This book’s serious resonances are cashed for small coin. This is a minor and misshapen novel from a potentially major voice. Robertson Davies said it: “With novels, like cakes, you never know.”