PositiveBookforumZink’s capacity for invention is immense, and for much of its first half, Mislaid zips along with a giddy, lunatic momentum. Its perverse wackiness is irresistible; unlike just about everything engineered to make you laugh out loud, Zink’s novel actually does, over and over again. And then, just as the book starts to seem like it will never run out of tricks, stasis sets in. Zink’s spry, impish tone calcifies into camp; her tremendous facility turns facile ... The strangest part of Mislaid is Zink’s abandonment, even punishment, of her initially vivid characters ... At its thinnest, Mislaid suffers from that insularity, the entertainer’s temptation to play to a familiar audience. But Zink is too irrepressible, too deliciously bananas, to get stuck in that pose for long. She knows how to let her freak flag fly. It won’t be long before she stakes it in new ground.
