{"id":41383,"date":"2015-06-12T21:45:53","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T21:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41383"},"modified":"2015-06-12T21:48:46","modified_gmt":"2015-06-12T21:48:46","slug":"mislaid-by-nell-zink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41383","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Mislaid,\u2019 by Nell Zink"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Mislaid,\u2019 by Nell Zink<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Sunday Book Review<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2015-06-04<\/p>\n

Walter Kirn<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nAgata Nowicka<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

Zink, Nell, Mislaid: A Novel<\/a><\/em> (New York: Ecco\/HarperCollins, 2015). 242 pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Toward the middle of Nell Zink\u2019s<\/a> \u201cMislaid<\/a>,\u201d a screwball comic novel of identity, Karen, a Southern white girl whose lesbian mother has raised her as black for complicated reasons, innocently asks a new friend, as though she were inquiring about her major: \u201cWhat minority are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHispanic,\u201d her friend replies. \u201cWe\u2019ve never done the genealogy, but you can tell by my name.\u201d<\/p>\n

In context, this is a laugh line, since the book has already answered, in a hundred ways, the question of what exactly is in a name: Nothing. Names mean nothing. They are labels stamped on mysteries, absurdly reductive and misleading. The same goes for racial and gender designations, which, in the book, are infallibly irrelevant to the highly individual business of living and loving according to our instincts rather than larger, social expectations. In \u201cMislaid\u201d everyone is a minority \u2014 of one…<\/p>\n

…When Peggy finally leaves her husband, afraid that he\u2019ll commit her to a psych ward for various acts of dramatic exasperation (including driving their car into the lake), she takes their daughter but leaves their son behind, setting the stage for a latter-day fairy tale thick with misunderstandings and coincidences, concealments and revelations. Rigging up the machinery of this plot consumes a lot of narrative energy and asks us to suspend our disbelief to greater and greater degrees, changing the book from a comedy of manners into an outright comedy of errors. Peggy moves into an abandoned house in a historically black rural settlement and gets her hands on a dead child\u2019s birth certificate, which she uses to conceal her daughter\u2019s past. She renames herself Meg and her daughter becomes \u201cKaren,\u201d who, per the stolen certificate, is black. \u201cMaybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people,\u201d the helpful narrator chimes in by way of quieting readers\u2019 skepticism. \u201cVirginia<\/a> was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the N.A.A.C.P<\/a>. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule<\/a>: If one of your ancestors was black \u2014 ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah\u2019s<\/a> son Ham<\/a> \u2014 so were you.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Mislaid,\u2019 by Nell Zink Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2015-06-04 Walter Kirn Agata Nowicka Zink, Nell, Mislaid: A Novel (New York: Ecco\/HarperCollins, 2015). 242 pages. Toward the middle of Nell Zink\u2019s \u201cMislaid,\u201d a screwball comic novel of identity, Karen, a Southern white girl whose lesbian mother has raised her as black for complicated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,6462,20],"tags":[20235,2640,2327,20238],"class_list":["post-41383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-nell-zink","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-walter-kirn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}