RaveFlavorwireNell Zink’s second novel, Mislaid, announces her as one of a handful of the best novelists on the American scene. More satirical, willfully magisterial, and, yes, even earnest than The Wallcreeper...Mislaid draws its immense humor and literary ingenuity from the postwar American South, that weird, melodramatic dispositif of class, race, and gender lines that strains to confine our lives even today. By the end of Mislaid, the satire dissolves into parody, or vice versa, leaving a cast of characters — of human animals in a habitat — who have rearranged their limitations, in a way that may offend many readers, in order to pursue better, shared lives ... Nell Zink has a thing, or a non-thing, or an anti-thing for Antonin Artaud’s \'theater of cruelty\' ... it seems to me that Zink does see this theater of cruelty as a default mode of American realism, or reality, and not, necessarily, a moral high ground. Whether this makes Mislaidsatire or parody is difficult to say. My gut tells me Zink understands the novel as satire, but that the South’s self-mediating tendencies will make it forever read as parody.
A. Igoni Barrett
PositiveFlavorwireBy the time it comes to its unsettling conclusion, Blackass has itself metamorphosed into an imperfect yet affecting social novel, yes, but also set of fateful contradictions about a mad world forcefully and originally seen through to the end.
