"When he met Peggy, he'd thought his homosexuality might be a great big cosmic typo"

I picked up  copy of Mislaid at the library at home in Thame a few weekend's back. I hadn't gone in looking for anything in particular but I was seduced by this cute cover and the fact that I'd enjoyed Nell Zink's other novel; The Wallcreeper. Truth be told I'd suggested in my review of The Wallcreeper that I'd be rushing out to pick up a copy of Mislaid straight way so I'm sorry for the delay!

Mislaid begins with a really interesting set up. Lee Fleming is a celebrated gay writer who retreats to a cushy academic role at a small college for women in Virginia where he teaches with minimum effort and fails to pick up a pen again. Nell Zink expertly writes these troubled and idiosyncratic characters and perfectly captures Lee's upper middle class condescension; "He envied straight men's lives of duty and gaiety, their world bounded by pregnancy and the clap".

Zink's portrays the college as a back-water second, or third, tier institution more well known for lesbianism than anything else yet it is here that Lee uncharacteristically starts a relationship, and ultimately marries, Peggy a student and wannabe play-write; "The existential angst served to mask her fear of Lee". This first part of the story brilliant charts the relationship and the awkward response from Lee's landed Virginia family. I'm a real fan of these campus set stories and Mislaid really delivers in the early chapters.

The story soon flips to Lee and Peggy's grown up children Byrd and Mireille who essentially live out the anxieties and fears of their parents in a similarly contained academic microcosm. Bryd is the handsome Ivy league sports hero struggling with his gay father and Mireille is a young girl who more comfortable recognises herself as African American. Zink always avoids the ordinary.

In any case Nell Zink is hugely comfortable writing dysfunctional family drama. The trouble is that the story doesn't really build on the great beginning. All the characters are literally thrown up into the area and don't really ever land again. For me this is forgivable as, narrative short-comings aside, Zink's characterisation is brilliant and I prefer my fiction slightly left-field.

I read this novel in hardback mostly on the train into Marylebone

Mislaid by Nell Zink published by Fourth Estate, 261 pages.