The kookaburra in the Berlin Zoo is ten thousand miles from home, squat, top-heavy, large of beak, attractive of plumage, and making what is, ounce for ounce, the loudest, strangest sound I have ever heard emerge from a living creature. It begins with a classic evil laugh, bwaaahahahaha, à la Vincent Price in “Thriller,” then the bird throws back its head and lets out a series of hoots, like a plump British woman with an unbecoming but infectious laugh or a parrot that grew up in a frat house, dissolves into giggles, transitions to a chortle, appears to become an entire dinner party going to pieces, then starts to pull it together, O.K., O.K., the guests wiping their eyes and settling down, until out comes a little chuckle and hahahahoik!ha, the bird is cracking up again.
“Oh, my God, you are truly weird,” Nell Zink tells the bird. Zink, a novelist—reared in rural Virginia, expatriated these past eighteen years, acquainted with weirdness, fond of birds—steps closer to inspect it. “Look at the blue in his wings,” she says: two shades, turquoise and teal. “He’s so designer. He looks like an Italian bathrobe.” Affronted, perhaps, the bird abruptly ceases its lunatic call. In the aftermath, the squawky room feels intensely quiet, the way even Manhattan seems silent when the car alarm across the street finally stops. After a moment, Zink resumes her conversation with the bird. “You can keep singing the song if you want,” she says. “I promise not to look at you that way again.” The kookaburra, unmoved, regards the wall. In the background, some other bird will not stop repeating a single grating note. “That one is ridiculed by its fellow-birds for its stupidity,” Zink says.
I am in this birdhouse because Nell Zink knows a lot about birds, and because almost no one knows anything about Nell Zink. Her début novel, “The Wallcreeper,” came out last year, when she was fifty. (The title refers to a mountain-dwelling bird with crimson wings.) She wrote it in three weeks, chiefly as a provocation to the novelist Jonathan Franzen, and sold it, for three hundred dollars, to a tiny publishing house, Dorothy, which focusses on books by or about women. At the time, she was trying to sell a different book, “Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats” (by Nell Zink). A friend told Zink about Dorothy and asked if her book was about women. No, she replied, the book’s main female character was a seal—more precisely, a half-seal, half-woman who is romantically involved with a Mossad agent tasked with finding and killing the heir to the throne of Israel, i.e., the closest living relative of King David. Anyway, Zink figured, probably not the kind of woman Dorothy had in mind. The main character of “The Wallcreeper,” though, was a woman, so she sent the press that book instead, even though she regarded it as “unpublishable trash.”
In that opinion, Zink found herself, not for the first time, at odds with the world. “The Wallcreeper” possesses an unimprovable opening sentence—“I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage”—which doubles as an introduction to how it feels to read Zink: swerve! crash! The book’s narrator, Tiffany, is the one notably not in the driver’s seat. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, in a figurative sense, she has ever looked at a map in her life; she lacks a goal, a plan, an inner compass, anything resembling a sense of direction. She meets Stephen in the pharmaceutical company where they work, marries him three weeks later, quits her job, and follows him as he is transferred to Switzerland and then to Germany. Stephen, it turns out, is passionate about birds. Tiffany, it turns out, is not passionate about Stephen. Together (sometimes), they wander around Europe, pursuing extramarital sex, environmental activism, and, eventually, environmental sabotage, until life falls apart and—in an end as swift and surprising as the beginning—Tiffany gets it together. A hundred and ninety pages and zero chapter breaks, the book sounds like nothing you have ever read, and derives its bang from ideas you hadn’t thought to have. Critics raved, including in the Times Book Review, a thing that had never happened in the history of Dorothy, or in the history of Nell Zink.
Zink’s new book, “Mislaid,” comes out this month from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. In its opening pages, the protagonist, Peggy Vaillaincourt, realizes that she is a lesbian—or, as she concludes, a man, more nuanced accounts of same-sex attraction being unavailable to preteens in small-town Virginia in the nineteen-sixties. Nonetheless, when she goes off to nearby Stillwater College as a slim androgynous girl of seventeen, Peggy begins sleeping with a gay male poetry professor, Lee Fleming. That gets her both pregnant and expelled, and before we have reached Chapter 3 the budding lesbian has become a faculty wife and a mother: to a son, Byrdie, and a daughter, Mireille.
In short, the title of this novel is a joke. Its protagonist, however, is soon mislaid in another sense as well. Lee quickly loses interest in Peggy and reverts to more familiar pastimes, and he reacts to her increasingly desperate unhappiness by threatening to institutionalize her. In response, she runs away, leaving Byrdie behind but taking Mireille, a blue-eyed, white-blond three-year-old. For a new home, she appropriates an abandoned shack in southeastern Virginia; for a new identity, she acquires, for her daughter, the birth certificate of a recently deceased four-year-old. The hitch: that late child was black. And so, presto chango, Peggy Vaillaincourt becomes Meg Brown, the single, impoverished, African-American mother of Karen Brown, a putatively black child whose patent whiteness is rivalled in American culture only by Steve Martin in “The Jerk.”
“Irreverent,” that prose-friendly adjective, does not come close. White writers seldom laugh about race—or, for that matter, write about it. But Zink, who has the courage of her convictions and the buffer of the Atlantic Ocean, creates in “Mislaid” a high comedy of racial identity: “The Human Stain,” backward, by David Sedaris. That makes the book a rarity on at least two fronts, because the shortage of smart new novels about race has nothing on the shortage of genuinely funny literary fiction. But Zink is a comic writer par excellence, one whose particular gift is the capacity to keep a perfectly straight face. “The Supreme Court had invalidated one segregation scheme after another, no matter how well it worked”: over and over, she deadpans her way through lines like that, not to mention through the entire antic setup of “Mislaid.”
The result is a hoot, a lark—all those bird words. But it is also deadly smart. Zink writes about the big stuff: the travesty of American apartheid; the sexual, economic, and intellectual status of women; the ephemerality of desire and its enduring consequences. We think of being deadpan as playing it straight during comic episodes, but Zink stays deadpan through everything—through outlandishness, anger, injustice, grief. Both that voice and the stories Zink tells are so startling, so seemingly without antecedent, that she would seem like an outsider artist, if she did not betray so much casual erudition.
Still, if not precisely an outsider artist, Zink was, for a very long time, an outsider: unknown, unpublished, living deliberately far from the mainstream and looking at it with the sharply angled vision that such a position affords. But, with the enthusiastic reception of “The Wallcreeper” and the publication of “Mislaid” by a mainstream press, Zink has migrated to the inside. At a time when American literati are debating whether writers are better served by living in New York City or getting an M.F.A., such migrations, from so remote a starting point, are far from the norm. How Zink accomplished hers, halfway through her life and from half a world away, is a story nearly as improbable as anything in “Mislaid.”
“Nell Zink,” Nell Zink assures me, is her real name. Her birth certificate lists her as Helen—“I guess because there was no St. Nell to baptize me after”—but she is Nell for all other official and interpersonal purposes. Zink offers up this information unprompted, but it is the case that her name, her life story, even her existence can provoke in others a sense of suspicion, a feeling that perhaps they are the subject of a colossal put-on. “Everything in her life beginning with her own name sounds made up,” Franzen told me. “ ‘Nell Zink from Bad Belzig’!”
Zink is not exactly from Bad Belzig, though that’s where she lives now. She was born in Corona, California, in 1964, moved with her family to King George County, Virginia, when she was seven, and is talking to me in Berlin, in the studio apartment, belonging to a friend, where she stays when she visits the city. The mattress she sleeps on while there is in a corner on the floor. She is sitting in a chair opposite, cross-legged, in cords and a hoodie, betraying no evidence of the fact that she is fifty-one or of the zany headlong energy of her books. In person, Zink is self-contained, deliberate, and serious. At present, she is nursing a cup of coffee and talking about artillery.
“In King George County, there’s a stretch of the Potomac River that does this—curves around and then runs straight for miles,” she says. The hand without the coffee cup snakes through the air to illustrate. “The Navy would test the guns for its ships there, up to eighteen-inch guns, just fire these huge projectiles, which would then sometimes come bouncing into Colonial Beach.” Sounds dangerous, I observe. Yes, she says. The river was closed to civilians during the week. Occasionally, the projectiles would bounce farther, into town.
Zink’s father, who died in 2006, was a Navy engineer; it was his job that brought the family to King George County. At the time, only some eight thousand people lived there, many of them black and a disproportionate number of the rest, she recalls, members of the Ku Klux Klan. Zink’s family was not among these, but she remembers the rallies, and, as a kid, she says, “it never crossed my mind that there was anything unusual about them.”
Zink grew up “in the sticks,” in a house surrounded by woods, with her parents and two brothers, one thirteen months older and one twenty months younger. It was not a happy childhood. In “Sailing Toward the Sunset,” she writes, “My verbal skill, such as it is, originated not in a habit of speaking, but in a lifetime spent preparing a single essay . . . on the subject ‘Why are you crying?’ ” That passage is autobiographical. “I did cry every day at school, for I don’t know how many years,” Zink says. Her mother, a librarian and Marine Reservist who became a housewife after marriage, pulled Zink out of class every six weeks or so, “for what she called psyche repair,” and, choosing to believe that Zink simply needed to be in college, took her to Fredericksburg and let her wander around the University of Mary Washington.
Zink really was intellectually undernourished, in both the Virginia public schools and the Shenandoah Valley boarding school she attended on a merit scholarship for the end of high school. But a better education would not have resolved her unhappiness. She makes it clear that her childhood was traumatic, in ways that render the word “perpetrator” relevant and that also implicate those who failed to protect her. But she is circumspect about the details, and wary of retroactive narratives. “I think a lot of people flatter themselves that their memories are much more accurate than they are,” she says, “and they forget that the perspective of a kid is so limited and unsophisticated.” For herself, she says, “I know for a fact that there’s a moral judgment I brought to it as an adult that I was incapable of having as a child. Just like with Klan rallies: it’s normal.”
Zink responded to her circumstances “by pitching my tent outside the folds of humanity.” She sought refuge in the wilderness surrounding her house, and in books. “We were encouraged to read,” she says, “because a child who is reading is a very quiet child and does not cause any trouble while it’s reading.” While still young, she fell in love with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and by the time she was eleven or twelve she had read “Hamlet,” in her estimation, “a million times.” Around that same age, she read “The Sacred Wood,” a collection of T. S. Eliot’s essays and literary criticism. When she wasn’t reading, she spent a lot of time sitting alone in a boat on a pond.
Zink began writing at a young age as well, but, unlike her reading, that behavior was not met with approbation. “My mother was very, very critical of my early efforts,” Zink says. “She was, like, ‘At your age, the Brontës were doing X, Y, and Z.’ ” She gives me an “I know” look; as an adult, Zink understands how that criticism sounds. As a child, however, she had already taken her own measure and found it wanting. “I was definitely a poser as a little kid,” she says. “It was just clear to me that—you know, in ‘Little Women’ they’re reading ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and putting out a newspaper and being unbelievably productive, and I was not like that. So I had this feeling of inferiority to past models with or without my mother’s criticisms.”
Partly in response to that feeling, Zink began keeping her writing to herself. In college, at William & Mary, in Williamsburg, she avoided English classes and studied philosophy instead—a decision that she now regards as a mistake, together with the past two hundred years of the discipline. Upon graduation, she stayed in Williamsburg and became intentionally homeless. “I didn’t have any money,” she says, “and I figured if you can talk somebody into storing your clothes you can sleep anywhere.” In her case, “anywhere” meant college lounges and the lobbies of public buildings.
Eventually, Zink found an apartment share that she could afford, partly because it was in a historically black neighborhood, and partly because, by then, she was employed. The position in question came about by accident; she had been on her way to apply for a job as a cocktail waitress when she ran into a bricklayer acquaintance, who offered to hire her instead. For the next four years, Zink worked as a bricklayer in the Tidewater region of Virginia. “That job was more valuable for my intellectual life than my entire college career,” she says. “In college, they allow you to be entertained and let your mind wander, which is not good training to do anything difficult.” Bricklaying, by contrast, cultivated discipline. When she started, she was teaching herself French by reading Sartre’s memoirs, “Les Mots,” with a dictionary in hand. The longer she worked in construction, she found, the longer she could stick with Sartre.
Leaning forward, Zink shows me her hands: they are, like the rest of her, long, slender, and unlined. When she worked in construction, she says, she had enormous calluses—not just on the palms but on the backs as well. After four years, she got tired of the toll on her body, and, in 1989, she moved to Washington, D.C., and got a job as a secretary. (“If you are raised to be submissive,” she says, “being a secretary is an excellent job. And I was an excellent secretary.”) While there, she met a graduate student in library sciences, Ben Burck, who was visiting from Indianapolis. After he returned home, the two began corresponding by letter, and, upon his graduation, he came back East to visit her. Within a week, they were married. The next year, Burck was hired by the New York Public Library, the couple moved to Hoboken, and Zink began working as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive.
That job came with a perk: office supplies. This was back in the heyday of zines, those semi-samizdat analogue blogs, and in 1993 Zink started her own, Animal Review, featuring music reviews by various contributors and short stories by her about animals. Meanwhile, she and Burck started a band, F.E.R.R.E.T.: Zink on guitar, which she’d learned as a kid; Burck on bass; a drum machine on drums. The zine attracted, at its peak, perhaps eighty readers. If you haven’t heard of the band, you are not alone. “There was a real nineties guitar-noise thing back then, and a million bands sounded alike,” Zink says. “And we sounded like all of them.” That is not something that would ever be said of Zink’s creative output again.
In 1995, Burck got a job at the University of Pennsylvania and the couple moved to Philadelphia, where the relationship ended as abruptly as it had begun: the afternoon they closed on a house, Zink told Burck that she was done. “Being married to an academic librarian, living in a house—that was not what she was comfortable committing her life to at that point,” Burck says. (The two have not seen each other in eighteen years, but they remain in touch and on good terms.) Zink stayed in town and continued to produce Animal Review. In 1996, a small article about her appeared in an issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which, in turn, appeared on a bench in a bus shelter, where an Israeli poet and musicologist named Zohar Eitan, on sabbatical at Penn, sat down on it. He fished the article out from under him, read it, and wrote Zink a letter, explaining, among other things, that his favorite animal was the ladybug. Eight months later, Zink married him, moved to Israel, and got a job as a technical writer for a software company.
By 2000, that relationship had ended as well, and, at the age of thirty-six, on an invitation from an old friend, Zink moved to Germany. Once there, she sat down, examined her life, and swore off marriage. Then she took a job as a translator and fell in love, instead, with birds.
In July of 2010, Jonathan Franzen published an article in this magazine on the illegal hunting of songbirds in the Mediterranean. Six months later, he received a two-page, single-spaced, typewritten letter postmarked Reutlingen, Germany. “Dear Mr. Franzen,” it began, “I recently translated Martin Schneider-Jacoby’s birding guide to the wetlands of the western Balkans.” The letter, which went on to describe the plight of birds in that region, was simultaneously erudite, colloquial, mocking, and sincere; it contained a reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s “Les Règles de l’Art,” an aside on the Balkan war, an untranslated passage in German, armed Italians, alarmed park rangers, great bustards, spotted crakes, “ditch” used as a verb, and the phrase “fucking it up.” The author expressed the conviction that Franzen would do his part for the birds of the Balkans, because “you love them for what they are (tiny little displaced persons).” Very truly yours, the letter concluded, Nell Zink.
Franzen laughs when he talks about the letter, a laugh of bemused appreciation that accompanies much of what he has to say about Zink. “It was so emphatic, so presumptuous, in a good way,” he says. “There was a feisty tone to it, not quite as strong as ‘You don’t really know anything about birds,’ but something like ‘They call you a New Yorker reporter and you didn’t even write about the Balkans?’ ” He wrote back to thank her, “and the next thing I knew,” he says, “I was getting, like, five e-mails a day.”
Five e-mails a day is a Zink specialty; since meeting her, I have routinely woken up to that many, a subject heading several lines down in my inbox serving as the ground floor to a little apartment building of postscripts, post-postscripts, corrections, emendations, and elaborations. Franzen, who is not normally in the market for pen pals, says that volume of correspondence would usually set off his crazy-person radar. But Zink’s e-mails were exceptional. For one thing, her erudition was startling. “She constantly referred to things that I not only hadn’t read but hadn’t even heard of,” he says. “If she made a list of her hundred favorite books and we compared it to mine, there might be four titles in common.” I understood what he meant when Zink told me she considers Yaakov Shabtai’s “Past Continuous” to be “one of the best books ever written in the history of the world.” She also praised the nineteenth-century* Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. (With some exceptions, the other authors Zink most admires also hail from east of the Rhine: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Andrei Platonov, Bruno Schulz.) Meanwhile, her own writing was equally startling. “Every e-mail was so vivid,” Franzen says. “She is somebody who could make a three-hundred-word account of going to the grocery store for milk an interesting story. It was just evident that she was this naturally fantastic writer.” Simultaneously alarmed by the e-mail deluge and impressed by the prose, he encouraged Zink to find a wider audience. “I said, ‘Maybe you should try writing fiction,’ ” Franzen said. “And she said, ‘Oh, I’ve done that.’ ”
In 1997, not long after Zink moved to Israel, Eitan took her to Haifa to introduce her to a friend of his, a writer named Avner Shats. By the end of the evening, Shats and Zink had launched an extraordinary friendship. The two lived some sixty miles apart and did not see each other often, but they began corresponding nearly every day. Zink also set about trying to read his first book, “Sailing Toward the Sunset,” but Shats regarded that as “an impossible task”: it was a difficult postmodern novel written in Hebrew, a language that Zink had barely begun learning. Either in defiance or in accord, Zink gave up trying to read it and started rewriting it in English instead.
Zink wrote “Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats” in three weeks. The novel has, Shats clarifies, “absolutely no similarities to my story”—or, for that matter, to any other story ever written. In addition to the seal-woman (a figure from Celtic mythology called a silkie) and the Mossad agent with the preposterous mission, the book features Zink herself, Eitan, and a mysterious submarine powered by a slip of paper on which is written the name of Moshe Dayan. Toward the end of the novel, that paper is transferred to and animates, with arresting results, the agent’s childhood Teddy bear.
Plenty weird, and plenty plenty, but that is not the sixteenth of it. “Sailing Toward the Sunset” also contains, among other things, an inquiry into the nature of translation; a translation proper, by Zink, of Robert Walser’s “The Job Application”; a lovely, controlled short story based on a diary entry by Kafka; a lot of incisive, off-the-cuff literary criticism (of Proust, Richardson, Faulkner, Eliot, Melville, Sterne, Solzhenitsyn); and a short work of science fiction, set in Long Island City, in a future where the global population has shrunk radically and those who remain in the planet’s skeletal, sky-high cities are “doomed, like the great whales: so few were left, in so large a space.” Avner Shats, the first and for many years the only reader of “Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats,” was, he says, “overwhelmed by her ability to write such excellent stuff so fast.” He liked it so much that he translated it into Hebrew.
“Sailing Toward the Sunset” is representative: until last year, all of Zink’s work was written for a tiny audience—generally as tiny as one or zero. While working as a bricklayer, she wrote a series of stories about a construction worker, then threw them all away. In Germany, she made friends with a Russian composer, and wrote, for his amusement only, a libretto for an operetta—in rhymed couplets, in German. In 2005, she wrote another novel for Shats, “European Story.” Set at an artists’ retreat in Florence, it is slightly less madcap than “Sunset,” but no less funny and smart. I know that only because Shats held onto his copy; Zink deleted hers. Later, she wrote another novel, “The Baron of Orschel-Hagen,” about a patron of the arts obsessed with commissioning a very particular work. Afterward, Zink decided she didn’t like it, and erased the original and all the backups.
Burck, her first husband, attributes the clandestine nature and short half-life of Zink’s writing to the Brontë-or-bust standard of her childhood. “The thought that she might write something that wasn’t good was terrifying,” he said, “so it’s safer to not write or not show anybody what you write.” Zink herself often speaks of writing for the love of writing, and that must be partly true, too. Certainly she was not reaping any reward, beyond the pleasure of amusing herself and maybe one other person. Still, she recognizes that directing her work to one heterosexual man who wasn’t her partner was a way of protecting herself: her writing could be interpreted as flirting, rather than as writing in earnest. “It’s nice to have the excuse of heteronormativity,” she says. “You can explain it away, you can say, ‘Well, she has a crush on him.’ It lowers the risks for me.”
Zink also recognizes that, although she was writing to men, she wrote in a way that men seldom do. “The standard male version of what I was doing,” she says, “is to have this unbelievably endless thing you’ve been working on since you were seventeen. I wasn’t like that at all. I was always trying to create some little thing, then finding it wanting and throwing it away.” After deleting “The Baron of Orschel-Hagen,” she decided to give up fiction altogether and pursue journalism, in German, on behalf of birds—a plan that held up until, as she put it, “I was hailed on my life raft by the passing containership Franzen.”
Bad Belzig is a town of some eleven thousand people, an hour southwest of Berlin. Zink’s apartment there consists of one main room, high-ceilinged and full of light, a bathroom, and a small kitchen, which has no refrigerator, because Zink regards refrigeration as unnecessary. The décor is attractive but spare, and although she has lived there for two years, she has not entirely unpacked; suitcases and half-opened boxes of books lean up against one wall. We sit on a rug next to a small bookcase, because there are no couches or easy chairs. It takes me a while to realize that there is no bed, either, and to identify as such the twin futon mattress in a corner on the floor.
Zink moved to Bad Belzig from Reutlingen to be near her current romantic interest—although not too near, because she has kept the vow she made in 2000 to avoid committed relationships. She refers to her non-partner only as Mystery Boy, and declines to say much about him, except that in the summer the two enjoy lounging by lakes and paddling the local rivers. That latter activity is logistically easy, because, she says, “for political reasons, he has access to a large collection of rubber rafts.” In public, he pretends not to know her.
Talking with Zink has this much in common with reading her books: you spend a lot of time feeling thrown. In part, that’s because her life is weirder than many. In part, it’s because both her range of reference and her computational power are immense; she has more dots, and she can connect them faster. And, in part, it’s because she can be mercurial. Generally thoughtful, she has a tentative manner that can turn abruptly confrontational. At one point, she showed me a lunchbox, now full of snapshots, that she has had since kindergarten. Made in 1967, it had a “Campus Queen” theme and, on its back, a board game: “Your date is late, wait one turn”; “Earn $10 babysitting, go to the movies.” Looking it over, I remarked, idly, that ten dollars per hour seemed like a lot of money for a babysitting gig in 1967. “Don’t be so pathetically American,” she snapped, not kidding, and delivered a short lecture on income stagnation: a bird ridiculing its fellow-bird for stupidity.
I didn’t take it personally, but I did take it as telling. “Pathetic” is a decent synopsis of Zink’s over-all attitude toward America. She is withering and reasoned about its socioeconomic structure (“From the perspective of Europe, America looks an awful lot like Brazil”), and withering and hyperbolic about its literary culture. She repeatedly described American readers as “quitting at page 4,” and expressed surprise that the critic who had travelled to Germany to meet her had read “Mislaid” to the end. She dislikes many of the books most widely revered here, and dismisses whole swaths of the national bookshelf as “Salinger-damaged postmodern crap.” (“Pynchon I’ve started again and again and thought, Who needs this?” she says. “The same thing with ‘Infinite Jest.’ I just can’t stomach the adolescent wonder-child gestalt that oozes off every page.”) She regards the U.S. publishing industry as shallow, profit-driven, and parochial.
Home, partner, companionship, literary culture: it is impossible, if you spend time with Zink, to miss the way she repeatedly embraces and repudiates, half-occupies and half-abandons so many parts of her life. Her mother, she wrote to me in one of her e-mails, “was a rock. But (for me) like one of those islands with no harbor, where the life raft circles around and everybody on it just gets hurt trying to disembark.”
We’ve seen Zink on that life raft before. But, for someone so shipwrecked, she initially responded in an unexpected way when, in 2012, Franzen, her putative rescuer, once again urged her to publish her work. Most writers would have been flattered. Zink was irritated, and the more admiration he expressed the pricklier she got. As Franzen saw it, prose like hers is so rare that, sooner or later, it gets the recognition it deserves. As Zink saw it, the publishing industry operated on cronyism and commercial possibility, while she lived six thousand miles away, knew zero insiders, and wrote the kind of stories those insiders would flatly reject. Eventually, she told Franzen to stop: “I was, like, either you’re going to support me in practical ways, or you’re going to shut the fuck up about my talent.”
The brazenness is only part of what’s surprising about that statement. The other part is that, for the first time, Zink was openly seeking to publish her work. Perhaps it was because she had recently lost her harshest critic: her mother died that year, at the age of eighty-five. Perhaps it was because of so much encouragement from her most powerful fan. Most likely, it was the confluence of those events. At any rate, when Franzen told her to let him know if she ever wrote something publishable, Zink sat down and generated, in four days, the first fifty pages of “The Wallcreeper.” Duly impressed, Franzen asked her to send along a complete manuscript when she had one. Too busy with a translation project to finish the new book right away, Zink sent him previous work, including “Sailing Toward the Sunset.”
Franzen recognized “Sunset” as too loopy and recondite to attract a large audience. But, he said, “it was so sparkly and funny that I agreed to find a publisher for it.” That proved difficult, and eventually he suggested that she write something slightly more accessible. By then, Zink herself had sent “The Wallcreeper” to Dorothy, so she sat down and drafted, again in three weeks, a new novel. She saw it, at the time, as a kind of loss leader for her other work—as, in her words, “agent bait.” The agents bit. Last year, shortly after Dorothy published “The Wallcreeper,” Ecco shelled out six figures for the book that became “Mislaid.”
The outsider status, the unusual taste, the hint of a hoax: all the qualities that make Zink’s life story so distinctive work remarkably well on the page. Her antagonism to the ideas, styles, and influences of her compatriots inoculates her against unoriginality. Her work combines, improbably, the intellectual traditions of Eastern Europe with the cultural traditions of rural Virginia. Her breakneck pace often serves her prose well, as does her cynicism. It isn’t a coincidence that “Mislaid” takes as its subject matter sexual and racial transgression, or that “The Wallcreeper” opens with a car crash and a miscarriage. That is Zink’s scorn at work: she knows what makes people look. But those moves are appropriations, not capitulations, and they abet subversive and original stories.
“Mislaid” is, in its way, as scathing a critique of America as the one that Zink offers in person. What differs, radically, is the tone. Built on the model of a Shakespearean comedy, the novel is a romp of disguise and mistaken identity, with race-swapping in place of cross-dressing. Crucially, that race-swapping happens in name alone, making it the moral opposite of blackface: Meg borrows the historically pernicious authority of the state to enforce racial identity, while changing nothing about the way she and her daughter look or behave. In effect, she hijacks the most extreme form of racial essentialism (the “one-drop” rule, codified in Virginia as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924) to serve the most extreme form of social construction.
But “Mislaid” is also a comic critique of something else: horrifically reckless parenting. Having abandoned one of her children and deceived the other, Meg, needing money, turns to dealing drugs. Thus she lives with two chronic fears: that the cops will take her away from her daughter, and that her daughter will learn her history and go away on her own. Inevitably, Karen does learn that history: in fiction, siblings separated at birth (or thereabouts) are two cute little guns on the wall. But this is a comedy, not a drama, so all the characters in “Mislaid” eventually find themselves in the same room—where, as in Shakespeare, all is revealed, and all is restored.
“Mislaid” is not a perfect novel. Comedies are tragedies plus time, the saying goes, but they can also be tragedies minus consequences. The characters in “Mislaid” hurt each other and tell epic lies and commit crimes, but no one ever seems fazed, and everyone gets away with it. That is a kind of realism—in life, too, perpetrators go unpunished all the time—and Zink often excels at exploring such truths through comedy. But the ratio of buoyancy to ballast ultimately goes awry in “Mislaid,” and I missed the moments in “The Wallcreeper,” few but sufficient, when the bill came due.
Still, I did love one thing about the end of “Mislaid”: the rise of a stealth protagonist. For nearly the entire book. Meg’s daughter, Karen, lurks in the background, almost ghostly, her life just the falling dominoes of her parents’ disastrous choices. Then, like Tiffany in “The Wallcreeper,” she surges to sudden agency at the eleventh hour, and you realize that the bildungsroman you have been reading has, all along, belonged to her.
Those endings work because they are surprising, and because it is moving to witness the moment when someone finally finds the courage to take control of her own life. It seems telling that Zink is drawn to such stories right now. There are a lot of ways to stay safe as a writer: by not writing, by writing to no one, by writing to a single admirer, by challenging the judgment of those with the power to judge, by not putting much effort into your work. “It’s hard,” Zink writes in “The Wallcreeper,” “trying to defend your territory and advertise your presence and keep out of predators’ line of sight.”
It is hard, but it is not impossible, as Zink herself now seems poised to prove. There were a lot of interesting birds in the Berlin birdhouse, but the one she looked at longest wasn’t in the zoo at all. It was just outside, hanging out in the blustery spring air, a nondescript smudge on a tree that became a nondescript smudge in the sky. Zink watched as it flew off, and wondered aloud what it was. She had been trying hard, she told me, to learn the birds of Germany, without much success. There are hundreds of species, for one thing. But also, she said, compared with their New World counterparts, European birds are exceedingly drab. “They’re all, you know, brown, with gray. Or gray, with brown. I saw a cardinal when I was in Brooklyn and I was almost moved to tears.” What stirred her was the fact that a creature so brilliant could survive in plain sight. “I was, like, I can’t believe this thing is legal. I can’t believe this thing is in the wild. How did this happen, how has someone not killed them all? They’re so conspicuous. They’re gorgeous. How can they still be alive?” ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated the time period in which Stifter wrote.