His commute to and from the college involves a canoe, because he’s an original hipster. A match made in hell, of course, yet they have a second child and Peggy plays housewife while Lee continues to teach. Yet they fall madly in lust and spend weeks going at it like rabbits until Peggy gets pregnant and Lee makes an honest woman out of her, meaning she also has to quit college. Lee Fleming, a famous poet who teaches at the college and runs its prestigious literary review, is gay.

The story alternates between the ridiculous and the sinister. On the very first page, Zink writes about Stillwater College: “There was no fishing because girls don’t fish.” The novel is rife with similarly dry statements (pretty much one per page) that reveal a deeply cynical core. Whatever the intention, there is no doubt that Mislaid is full of social criticism from start to finish. Whether it is satirical, however, is harder to decipher.

I can already hear the roars of dismay from various factions of the feminist and LGBTQIA communities as someone who considers herself a part of both, it is often hard to remember that the novel’s irreverence toward political correctness is (probably) purposeful. She is only happy many years later in life when she tells herself, in a moment of clarity, “You idiot… You’re a femme!” Only then does she find true love and happiness, when she wears pantyhose and makeup.

Within the first few pages of the novel, we find out that Peggy “was intended to be a man,” that “girlhood was a mistake,” and that she is a “thespian” (by which Zink means to convey a mishearing of lesbian). One of the main characters, Peggy Vaillaincourt, is everything her rich parents don’t want her to be. Yet, as is soon revealed, it is the typical picture of a women’s liberal arts college, full of bull-dykes and radical feminists and man-haters, which stereotypically amounted to the same thing in the 1960s and ’70s when the early sections of the book take place. The novel opens with a description of Stillwater College, an all-girls school that is not a direct parody of either Wellesley or Sarah Lawrence. The front cover blurb indicates that Franzen sees Zink as “A writer of extraordinary talent and range.” This is true, yet my dominant thought as I read the book was not “here is talent, here is range, here is writing at its best,” but rather, “this book is going to piss a lot of people off and I’m not sure whether it’s worth it.” Nell Zink’s newest novel, Mislaid, has the official Jonathan Franzen seal of approval.

Private novelist by nell zink