That Was Why the Dramatic Flight
From Mislaid, a novel by Nell Zink.
She couldn’t help herself. Life with Lee had been so drab that running away had a bounden duty to be exciting. She felt she had a right to ask that much. That was why the dramatic flight, the abandoned houses, the new identity.
This is the kind of escape I don’t think about often enough, so obsessed am I with quitting work: people who flee their crappy partners.
Mislaid is a superb and darkly funny novel. The protagonist, Peggy, starts out as a viciously intelligent undergrad whose academic career is sidelined by an inappropriate (but fun to begin with) relationship with her (gay) poetry professor. Things get worse and she, along with her daughter, escape to live under assumed identities. Peggy becomes “Meg” and Mireille becomes “Karen.”
I’d better not say much more because some of the surprises in the book really would be ruined by advance knowledge, though the LA Review of Books has an excellent write-up if you don’t care about spoilers.
I’ll mention, however, that we don’t spend all of our time on the road with Peggy/Meg and Mireille/Karen and do in fact stay partially with Lee, witnessing his hilarious tantrums and earnestly struggling to raise his preppy son on his own. In that side of the book we witness the following phrase bellowed at the tenured poetry professor:
“Dammit, Lee. You bullshitted your way into the last of the bullshit jobs!”
It’s a different definition of bullshit jobs to the one we use here at New Escapologist, but that (I think) is what makes it so funny.
One would hope that teaching and writing poetry on the campus of a great American university would be one of the most dignified jobs imaginable. But if you use it as a vehicle for your own time-wasting and wheel-spinning, it’s probably just as bad as gawping into someone else’s spreadsheets in an open-plan office. And it would be all your own fault!
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About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk