Fitting in
There are authors who shape-shift from book to book, trying on the occasional regional dialect with a ring to it or playing with the accoutrements of some genre, perhaps even, or especially, in order to critique the type of narrative itself. Then there are the authors whose voices are constituted by particularized shape-shifting within and between sentences. They are the ones whose prose belts across the page in such a way that both gestures back toward the author and points to the plasticity of language, the possibilities available when words grind up on each other. We call these authors, like Nell Zink, great stylists.
Zink, whose highlighter streak of a debut novel, “Wallcreeper,” was published last year, has a voice so singular you might start generating nonce words just to describe it. Then, when you give up on anyone understanding what “zazephyrousgate” means, you might note that her sentences propel with bounce, bounce often blindsided to hilarious effect by vigorous bluntness; that sometimes slangy phrases find themselves disoriented by offhand esoterica; or that nervy turns away from sentimentality doughnut over a rough weave of cartoon-colored existential malaise and childlike wonder.
“Mislaid” is Zink’s new novel, a baroque kind-of-comedy of errors. It begins in a Virginia college town, home of Peggy Vaillancourt, who, born in 1948, believes the best setting for lesbian sexual enterprise will be attending Stillwater College. Before she can remove the pants from any pert young ladies on campus, however, she’s swept up in sexual hijinks with a man-of-leisure-cum-poet, Lee Fleming. There’s a bit of symmetry to the affair, since Fleming is gay, but each party’s attraction to the same sex doesn’t quite gird a heterosexual marriage.
The problem is that Peggy’s already pregnant, so like any good girl — though actually, Peggy isn’t much of a good girl at all — she drops out of school, ties the knot, unhappily catches her husband waggle his thing at boy and girl alike, and produces two offspring. When it all becomes too much, she runs away with their daughter, Mireille, leaving behind her older son, Byrdie. To avoid legal repercussions, she appropriates black identities for her and Mireille, so that the small white family becomes a small black family that could pass as white. They move to a cottage in the swamp, while their male counterparts enjoy the champagne and art snob life
Throughout the book, Zink’s tone remains steadily bemused. Lee’s take on male heterosexuality floats with nonchalant condescension, and the result is droll: “He envied straight men’s lives of duty and gaiety, their world bounded by pregnancy and the clap. Nothing you couldn’t laugh off or submit to. A shallow place, but how to tell them gently? Best not to try. They were more fun inno- cent.”
Race relations, however, do, even as they function as an engine of plot, feel somewhat under-interrogated. There are challenges for Peggy and Mireille — aliases Meg and Karen — but Zink holds these challenges at a distance, levying them for humor, generally at the expense of dim white people, and sometimes misses the opportunity to explore the nuances of black identity in America, or even those of her characters’ inner lives.
Of course, Zink isn’t particularly interested in nuance. Her larger-than-life comedy situates itself somewhere between “The Huron” and “As You Like It.” Like “Wallcreeper,” “Mislaid” skips forward with an oddball cast of characters improbably optimistic considering the bleak. conditions they often find themselves navigating. And this, perhaps, is the greatest thrill of Zink’s work; her fiction presents characters who act just ludicrously enough to be human.