Nell Zink: “Virginia” – When a white child suddenly turns black (archive)

By Maike Albath

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A novel that most pleasantly stirs our perception patterns: Nell Zink’s “Virginia” (Rowohlt Verlag / Unsplash / Dustin Scarpitti)

Nell Zink’s lesbian heroine falls victim to a gay poet, fathered two children with him and later escaped from her dreary everyday life. The result is a novel that is provincial antics as well as marriage drama and confusion comedy.

There is hardly an American holy cow that Nell Zink does not slaughter in her rapid novel “Virginia”. The German, who was born in California in 1964, delicately roams through the everyday culture of the USA and sausages everything she can get her hands on. The result is a highly amusing ghost train ride through contemporary history, a mixture of college clothes, provincial antics, marital drama, confusion comedy, satirical educational novel, manual for misleading the authorities and guidelines for young mothers without vocational training. How can that work?

Quite simply, Nell Zink seems to have thought. The author designed a biography of women from the early 1960s, supplemented it with her own living material, dipped the whole thing into a caustic bath of literature, effectively used exaggerations and forged it into a readable story. “Virginia” is Zink’s second novel, which was originally published in 2015 and is now also available in German after her great success with The Wall Runner (2016) and Nicotine (2018).

Three months of unsuspecting sex, pregnancy – and then?

Her heroine is called Peggy Vaillaincourt, was born in 1948 and ends up in an indifferent childhood home at college Stillwater. She is actually a lesbian, but with her androgyny she brings the only male and gay member of the teaching staff to the test: Lee Fleming, black sheep of a long-established East Coast dynasty, talented poet, lecturer and editor of a poetry magazine. After three months of unsuspecting sex and being kicked out of college, Peggy is pregnant, married by Lee, but has to endure his bohemian life as a spectator from now on.

The son Byrdie enchants both, but Peggy’s own literary ambitions no longer matter. She has child number two, a daughter named Mireille, and when her husband runs wild with a boy before his eyes, she quickly drives Lee’s car into Stillwater Lake, barely escapes admission to the psychiatric facility, grabs the daughter and dives into it Virginia under. With the help of a stolen birth certificate, she gives the three-year-old Mireille a new identity.

In the end, a satire with a forced happy ending

The highlight of the matter: the late girl Karen was black, and from now on the flaxen blonde daughter and thus Peggy, who is now called Meg, are considered black. For years, Meg has been successful with smaller drug trafficking. At the same time, Byrdie’s fate unfolds, which grows into a likeable nerd. In the end, there is even a family reunification in a satirical report on American forced happy endings.

With its programmatic insanity, “Virginia” sometimes goes beyond the strands, but form and language develop something seductive, and the gain in knowledge has it all. Nell Zink shows how questionable the common categorizations of gender, skin color and ethnicity are. A portion of zinc makes our perception patterns tumble most pleasantly.

Nell Zink: “Virginia”
From the English by Michael Kellner
Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 2019
318 pages, 22 euros

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