Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. 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.Ī promising premise rendered in dispirited, disappointing prose.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. 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.
It would be surprising if Peggy’s discovery of sex-with a man, no less-didn’t provoke “new feelings.” This is typical of the novel as a whole.
To cite just one example: “She was feeling new feelings, emotional and physical, new pains and longings, and she couldn’t make notes…but she kept careful track of them, mentally.” Zink offers no description of the precise nature of these “pains and longings.” She merely mentions that they exist, which, given the context, could probably go without saying. The novel reads more like an outline for a story than the story itself. What Zink delivers is…not much of anything. This is an ambitious premise, one that seems poised for an interrogation of race, sexuality, and social class. And, as she starts her new life, Peggy decides to pass as black. Eventually, Peggy leaves, taking her daughter but not her son. This pregnancy leads to marriage, and the marriage leads to another pregnancy.
The fact that she’s a lesbian doesn’t stop her from falling into an intensely physical affair with Lee Fleming, Stillwater College’s most famous-and most famously gay-faculty member. Peggy Vaillaincourt is a first-year student at a tiny women’s college in Virginia.
New novel from the critically acclaimed author of The Wallcreeper (2014).
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