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...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 result is a hoot, a lark—all those bird words. But it is also deadly smart ... 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.

Zink’s narrator is a knowing, omniscient figure who speaks directly to the reader while floating anonymously above the story, offering sharp observations and mordant commentary and smoothly moving things along in the manner of novels from an earlier century ... This lost mode of storytelling, updated by Zink, imbues the book with an elegance and confidence that are exceptionally rare now, and most welcome. Instead of the crabbed, neurotic tone that one might expect when treating such loaded material, she skips along with ease and clarity, summarizing, compressing and encapsulating, unflappably wise and in control ... This odd situation’s farcical unraveling harks back to Elizabethan comedy, and Zink exploits its potential with zany verve. The problem is that, in contriving her grand finale and systematically playing against type as she sketches her swelling cast of characters, her hold on the story loosens somewhat ... The damage isn’t fatal, though; the novel’s charm and intelligence run deep. It’s a provocative masquerade with heart, not just an exercise in role reversals, reminding us that the gaps and cracks between our insides and our outsides are the spaces where our spirits live.

...[Zink] takes thrilling narrative shortcuts in order to make space for her characters’ oracular and erudite disquisitions—while also dispensing with many of the supposed requirements of the 'literary novel'...In the space of a page, Zink readers should expect to learn of a character’s progressive engagement with Dylan Thomas, Prince, and Samuel Beckett. We should also be ready for seemingly important male characters to die off suddenly, with a lack of emotional affect that would likely impress Sartre or Camus...And while Mislaid may claim fewer jokes per page than Zink’s debut...it is the bolder and more memorable fictional creation. The plot’s broad strokes are the stuff of comic opera, updated for the 20th-century American south ... Obviously, the narrative strands are going to collide. Obviously, before that occurs, the book all but taps you on the shoulder to suggest that you might dispute its plausibility ... But it’s precisely by giving readers a new and outlandish tale – one that strays well beyond the borders of so-called 'realism' – that Mislaid becomes surprisingly affecting ... It would be easy for passages steeped in such knowingness to curdle into a work of literature that’s more grimly impressive than it is joyfully immersive. So it’s a delight to find that, ultimately, the kids of Mislaid come out a little less damaged than their parents. Like Zink’s own writing style, they’re too hip to the sins of the past to fall back on easy political characterizations and assumptions, and too witty to be depressed for very long.

Here, Zink has found a premise that allows her to explore the issues around race by turning one trope after another inside out. This is also a way in which Mislaid engages with American fiction’s long tradition of looking at race through satire...Here is a white woman satirizing her own ridiculous species ... Mislaid is not just a backwards route to examining oppression, it is a straightforward route to an examination of shelter, in the literal and the metaphorical sense .. Zink can be cruel and punishing to all her characters, but she always grants them a way out ... Mislaid isn’t a perfect novel, but that is partly because it isn’t really a novel. In an interview, Zink said that she structured it according to a 'Viennese operetta.' This makes sense — the book is episodic, dialogue-heavy, and its ending recalls Elizabethan comedies...It is also, frankly, a little bit exhausting keeping up with the constant jokes and the density of the text. It’s sharp and fun but it’s also demanding. It can be similar to the exhaustion of spending time with a very smart and very funny friend, who is often one step ahead of you. You’re a little confused, a little disoriented but the experience, overall, can be exhilarating. It’s also a little stressful. How are you ever going to keep this person only to yourself?

Mislaid slots itself into some of the most familiar subcategories of American literary fiction ... It’s a joke about all the kinds of novel that Americans already know and love. This is why it was such effective agent bait – Zink got a very big advance ... Mislaid is not primarily or even secondarily an earnest attempt to think about racism or the prison-industrial complex, but Zink knows what’s going on, and occasionally says so ... The rapid pace at which these first two novels were written suggests a graphomania that hasn’t yet had the chance to take satisfaction in its freedom. Zink fires all over the place, which makes it all the more impressive that her shots usually land. She has yet to identify a favourite among the many fictional worlds available to her, and she may decide it’s not worth picking a favourite at all. She can probably figure some of this out by writing and publishing a dozen books in the next 18 months.

The satire, if it's satire, loses its edge when it loses its grasp on reality. The one-drop rule was not invented to hand out free lunches. Even the more compelling critique of identity falls apart during a head-scratching happy ending in which order is restored, the world re-sorted into black and white, gay and straight, and Meg's lies and Lee's sociopathic abuse are either forgiven or forgotten ... There's something inexcusably glib about [it] ... Zink obviously has guts, talent and a long career ahead of her, but Mislaid feels muddled.

...a screwball, vaguely Shakespearian comedy of errors in which the protagonist tries on and casts off characteristics we generally consider immutable ...just when it looks as though Zink is delving into pure fantasy—a world in which appearances don’t matter in the slightest— in fact she is exposing the reality of the one-drop rule, a system that has nothing to do with skin color.

Zink writes with such faux innocence that her cracks about sexuality and race detonate only after she has riffed off to the next unlikely incident. If you’re easily offended or confused, mislay this book and go back to All the Light We Cannot See. ... one picks up this novel ready to be transformed by the afflatus of its hipnicity. And at first, the advance praise sounds wholly deserved. Not a drop of acid mars the surface of this deadpan satire as it darts along, mocking and skewering the racist, homophobic and generally dingbat ideals of its characters ... Mislaid feels like a subversive minstrel show sprung from an encyclopedic mind drunk on the Mad Hatter’s tea. ... her satire has blood on its fangs, but she’s still smiling ... While the improvisational quality of her storytelling keeps Mislaid engagingly off-balance, it also creates thin stretches and dead ends as the plot lurches toward a romantic-comedy ending. It’s tempting to hope that Zink’s unnerving humor might pry open a space for us to think more reflectively about racism, homophobia and sexism than our earnestness usually allows. But the audience for Mislaid is surely limited, not by its politics so much as by those spores of tedium that eventually germinate and spread across the pages. This is a slim novel that reads better in excerpts.

Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blonde black people,' quips the narrator, making clear that Zink, tongue firmly in cheek, is writing a peculiar kind of fantasy. While by and large it's fun to go with it, the novel's problems run deeper than the color of the characters' skin ... the novel toes the dangerous line between exploding the worlds it purports to represent (that is, sexual, racial and class identity) and reinforcing the stereotypes of a world in which the academic, esoteric — and ultimately, white — reign ... Though this sentiment is problematic for several reasons, its most alarming aspect is that it goes mostly unchallenged ... Zink,...clearly delights in bucking the norm. But which norms, and why? Mislaid shows a uniquely zany worldview, but ultimately, it misfires.

A plot summary of Mislaid will certainly reel in an audience, but it is Zink’s singular way of telling her story and upending just about every societal norm you can think of that keeps us gripped ... Full of irony, contradiction and parody of southern American culture, the book takes on taboos ...with a narrative that chops and changes between adult characters and their children, who mature into surprisingly well-adjusted teenagers. Mislaid is unsentimental in the extreme ... The novel is highly quotable, with so many memorable lines that you almost miss them with the speed of the plot ... Nothing is sacrosanct in this novel – racism, gender, sexual violence, patriarchy, family – and Zink’s feverish, intelligent writing carries the reader along for the unholy duration.

The Wallcreeper and Mislaid are stylishly written novels with negligible narrative drive. As a result of this duality — wit, erudition and a sly unpredictability combined with a perplexing paucity of forward thrust — Nell Zink’s first and second books are the sort you start with an exhilarated sense of discovery and then don’t get around to finishing, you’re never quite sure why ... Zink is exploring America’s gender and racial politics, but in the spirit of a romp. Especially in its disappointing latter pages, Mislaid more resembles Even Cowgirls Get the Blues than Black Like Me. With such freighted subjects, lightheartedness is welcome. Yet both novels exhibit a defiant lack of investment in the characters and their fates — as if the author holds both her cast and the novel form itself in mild contempt.

Nell 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.

Mislaid is a brilliant comedy of errors, often about getting laid, told at breakneck speed ... all the mantles of the privileges of being straight and white and rich are dumped on the floor. Add to that the amount of laying, or mislaying, as the book skips through gay sex, lesbian sex, interracial sex, underage sex, and this is quite a romp through every nook and cranny of identity ... You cannot escape the Shakespearian element, the mechanics of comedy and farce that work through the novel, and towards the last third there comes the inevitability that the paths of Lee and Peggy, Mireille and Byrdie will collide in the future. ut the drive there is delicious: Zink’s prose revs and careers through the plot. Before you’ve blinked a decade of debauchery, misery, deceit and hedonism flashes by, and you’re awaiting the moment of impact.

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. Whether it is satirical, however, is harder to decipher. Whatever the intention, there is no doubt that Mislaid is full of social criticism from start to finish ... The novel is rife with...dry statements (pretty much one per page) that reveal a deeply cynical core ... The novel’s climax and denouement become a screwball comedy that feels like a racy, drugged-out version of The Parent Trap with a smatter of campus-rape issues thrown in. I’m not going to spoil what actually happens, if only because it matters so very little. The ending is not satisfying, and it feels rushed ... At a mere 242 pages, Mislaid is a manifesto for every social issue being talked about in America today ... It’s a mirror to our social conscience, and as such it is effective ... But the novel, though well-written enough, isn’t much more than shaggy-dog morality tale. The plot is convenient and occasionally amusing and sometimes gasp-out-loud politically incorrect in the way a Louis CK standup is...Zink tells us we’re all complicit in the issues, but reading her novel felt like being underneath a trampoline she was jumping up and down on. She seemed to be having lots of fun; all I got was a nose bent out of shape.

Zink’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.

This is an ambitious premise, one that seems poised for an interrogation of race, sexuality, and social class. What Zink delivers is…not much of anything ... It’s not necessary, of course, for a protagonist to be introspective and insightful, but it’s a problem when the author herself seems not terribly interested in her creation. Zink’s lack of curiosity about her characters and the connections between them seems especially odd because notions of identity—how we see ourselves, how others see us—are such a significant feature of her very baroque plot. A promising premise rendered in dispirited, disappointing prose.

Mislaid demonstrates that [Zink] can write several kinds of novel, and if the book appears to outrageously shift tempos, given how successfully Zink ratchets up the pacing and intensity after brother and sister unknowingly cross paths, it’s hard to imagine any readers complaining. Ironic, harsh and sometimes corrosively cynical in tone, Zink writes with energetic, ecstatic abandon...She delves fearlessly and credibly into race and gender issues, onloading on old Virginia in just-right didactic bursts. Zink develops peculiar and wonderful characters, and she writes situational humor...with a deftness and ease it took John Irving twice as many books to master. Each of the book’s three surprise sexual awakenings plays out funnier than the last. Zink shares a bit of Annie Proulx’s way with a skull-cracking verb, although she delivers bigger and more consistent off-kilter laughs...But mostly, Nell Zink writes like Nell Zink, which is the best news of all, especially if she continues to write this funny and this fast.

The novel deftly handles race, sexuality, and coming of age. Zink’s insight is beautifully braided into understated prose that never lets the tension subside; the narrator’s third-person voice is wry, and the dialogue is snappy ... The various ways the characters’ memories and motives affect the action is frequently 'mislaid,' from the inciting relationship to the far-flung situations in which the characters find themselves—it all points to Zink’s masterly subtlety and depth.