Mislaid: A Novel
Nell Zink
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0062364782
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
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—she’s a lesbian, he’s 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 Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie deals with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s 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.
campus security would have involved the police in anything short of murder. A week later, they got the car out with a farm tractor and some oak planks. It was doable only because the water in the lake had fallen to the level of the car’s submerged front axle, leaving a wide and hideous beach of glutinous brown slime. Mrs. Fleming was firmly established as a legend on campus, and Lee was . . . . . . livid? Was he livid? Are there words to describe how Lee was? Less privileged men sometimes
overprotective, but she had doubts about Karen’s going into the woods alone. Turkey season seemed especially risky. Karen moved as irregularly as a bird, and she was about the height of a turkey. “This is like Red Riding Hood’s riding hood,” Meg explained as she unwrapped a protective cap from the Army/Navy. The cap had a dense fake fur lining and ear flaps that tied under the chin with ribbons. Karen was under orders not to take it off for even a second. She was very blond, and you don’t want to
shroom beats four cents a worm any day of the week.” “You got that right,” Lomax replied. “Drugs is where the money’s at.” Lomax was a middle-class Indian. Rather than on the Mattaponi reservation, he grew up in a tract house in Spotsylvania County. Both his college-educated parents had office jobs pushing paper in the highway department. A social outcast at work, Lomax’s father had become an avid chipmunk watcher. The house’s large, flat backyard was the scene of unceasing warfare among the
was simple and immediate: boarding school. He never saw her again. One afternoon Meg saw out the window that a large red tanker truck was backing through the courtyard, right over Karen’s mouse town. The town for mice was something between a garden railway and the Lilliputian village in Mistress Masham’s Repose. It was small and inconspicuous, being modeled on the county’s towns of one or two stores each. It was very childish and in Meg’s view due for destruction, but still the truck went right
sensitivity to poison ivy, Karen seldom went in the woods anymore, but the effects of her early training persisted. She would stare at the sky as if it were a TV—as if clouds were more fun than a barrel of monkeys, as Dee put it. Karen’s mind was racing. She had just finished reading Malaparte’s Kaputt and was deeply moved. (The library, like the thrift shop, specialized in the leavings of the elderly dead.) She wanted to talk to Temple about it. She seldom confided in Meg. Like many fresh human