MISLAID, Nell Zink's N.B.A.-longlisted novel from 2015

MISLAID
NELL ZINK
Ecco
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE. USE THEM OFTEN, THEY PAY AUTHORS FOR OUR USE.

My Review: Longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, this absurdist-humor take on closeted family life is...dated. Nothing dates faster than humor. I decided to read it so I could borrow another Prime Lending title.

The idea of the book did not appeal to 2025 me but I'm pretty sure I can't blame my lack of enthusiasm for the read on that. It is an idea that never gets old: Fish out of water, mistaken identity/dark family secret, male privilege...all present and ready for their close-up, Mr. deMille.

So why wasn't I amused, I mused. I got a lot of pleasure from the author's evocation of place, I resonated to her skewering of idiotic-to-me performative DEI stuff that masquerades as help but is meant to stigmatize and demean, I was wickedly entertained by the silliness of the closet and its Procrustean demands. Sounds like I ought to be warbling, no? So what the hell, old man, is the problem?

It's mean.

It felt to me as though all the laffs it sought were AT the people here, not with them, knowingly winking at the nonsensical antics. It felt like I was invited to sneer and judge. I'm guilty of both those nasty things, but not at hapless victims of circumstance. Mental illness played for humor isn't on nowadays.

In 2015, this was the mode for humor. It was enough that a nebbishy gay poet and a sexually adveturous sapphic-at-heart woman would try to form a stable family, let alone raise kids, when they could not possibly answer one another's needs of any sort. (It's that last bit that bugs me.)

So, well, award nominee or not, nice sense of Appalachian place or not, it's just not a story I'm going to like in 2025. In 2015, I'd've been its biggest booster. In Trump Two, I am not.