Private novelist by nell zink5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() The Reverend Vaillaincourt felt important all the time, because he was descended from a family that had sheltered John Wilkes Booth” (2-3). Vaillaincourt, who felt important as a result. This was before psychologists and counseling, so if a girl lost her appetite or a woman felt guilty after a D&C, she would come to Mrs. Her mother was his wife – a challenging full-time job. ![]() Equally efficient is this passage about Peggy’s parents: “Her father was an Episcopal priest and the chaplain of a girls’ boarding school. It was indirectly her fault that Peggy thought of “man” as a job title” (4). Zink accomplishes a lot of spot-on characterization in the novel’s opening pages an example I especially enjoy is the moment at a barbeque when Peggy “recognize the woman everybody said was the maintenance man at the elementary school. Peggy Vaillaincourt’s parents know she is odd (her gym suit never quite fits right, she wants to join the army, and so forth), and her mother’s response to these quirks is to declare her daughter “a thespian” (4), apparently without irony. The premise of this novel is a fascinating one: what would happen if a lesbian and a gay man got married? Zink raises the stakes by posing this question in the context of an all-women’s college in Virginia in the 1960’s. ![]()
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