Synopses & Reviews
A sharply observed, mordantly funny, and startlingly original novel from an exciting, unconventional new voice—the author of the acclaimed
The Wallcreeper—about the making and unmaking of the American family that lays bare all of our assumptions about race and racism, sexuality and desire.
Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The two are mismatched from the start—shes a lesbian, hes gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.
Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lees children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his fathers compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mothers lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.
Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.
Review
“A writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. You might not want to believe this, but her sentences and stories are so strong and convincing that you'll have no choice.” Jonathan Franzen
Review
“Zink's capacity for inventions is immense… [Mislaid] zips along with a giddy, lunatic momentum. Its perverse wackiness is irresistible; unlike just about everything engineered to make you laugh out loud, Zink's novel actually does, over and over again… She knows how to let her freak flag fly.” BookForum
Review
“Zink's energy pulses in narration. [She] is original, unsentimental, erudite, and something of a naturalist. Her vocabulary is tremendous [and] her sentences are penetrating and agile.” Harper's Magazine
Review
“[Zink] further proves her narrative chops as she spins a darkly satirical story … Zink's frankness on topics like gender, racial, socioeconomic, and sexual identity politics is refreshing and bold, but it is her strong writing and lucid sentences which truly reel readers in-and keep them there.” L Magazine
Review
"The bracing disconnect between sly, low-affect prose and Gothic strangeness recalls Flannery O'Connor and Jean Stafford—mid-century women you could imagine crossing paths with Peggy and shuddering.” Vulture
Review
“[Zink] makes her big publishing debut with with this unconventional but ultimately brilliant novel that takes family, race, and the how decisions you make could resonate for years to come.” Men's Journal
Review
“Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper was the most impressive debut of 2014…her second novel, the hilarious and genius Mislaid, which restores a kind of Whitmania to American fiction, by which I mean that it convincingly covers race, class, gender, and sexuality in the briefest of spaces with the sharpest of minds.” Flavorwire
Review
“A deceptively slim epic of family life that rivals a Greek tragedy in drama and wisdom…deftly handles race, sexuality, and coming of age. Zink's insight is beautifully braided into understated prose that never lets the tension subside… it all points to Zink's masterly subtlety and depth.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
“The title of Nell Zink's new novel is just the first wry, indecorous joke in this zany-brainy story...Zink writes with such faux innocence that her cracks about sexuality and race detonate only after she has riffed off to the next unlikely incident.” Washington Post
Review
“Mislaid's pathos is charmingly funny, and a sentimental streak softens the sarcasm... captivates from the very first page... Comic, sympathetic, heartbreaking and outrageous, Mislaid is a wonderful, raucous book.” Shelf Awareness
Review
“There's nothing derivative about Nell Zink's hip, hilarious and unexpectedly moving novel Mislaid… Zink has a genius for making the bizarre seem natural… makes for one of the most satisfying happy endings in recent fiction.” Wall Street Journal
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“Perhaps most impressive about ... Mislaid is the author's seemingly endless capacity for wit…Zink peppers her story with clever one-liners and quick exchanges….Its smart, sharp prose that invests the reader in the story." Electric Literature
Review
“Zink's deadpan wit is matched by an ethical deadpan… [She] isn't a moralist. She creates fictional worlds beyond the bounds of the going taboos, then pushes those bounds to the logical extremes. … Mislaid uses southern racism as fuel for devious comic flights.” New York magazine
Review
“Zink's life story and her fairy-tale path to publication have nothing on the antic sparks of her prose, her freewheeling extra-canonical allusiveness, her swings from the register of love to a mode of contempt… ” New York magazine
Review
“Looking for a brainy yet breezy novel that addresses gender, race, and class issues with levity and has a happy ending? Try Nell Zink's Mislaid… a funny, entertaining, lightweight highbrow novel perhaps best read in a single afternoon under a beach umbrella.” New York Journal of Books
Review
"A lesbian in the conservative South during the mid-1960s, Peggy falls under the spell of Lee, a gay aristocratic poet, in Zink's zany farce. The comedy of errors cunningly exposes our deep-seated prejudices about race and desire.” O, the Oprah Magazine
About the Author
Nell Zink grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her writing has also appeared in n+1. Her debut novel, The Wallcreeper, was published in 2014. She lives near Berlin, Germany.