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Summary
Summary
WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly 's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020.
"The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy
In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew's presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew's story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are--a devil or an angel or something else entirely--is dwarfed by even larger truths.
Pew , Catherine Lacey's third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters' true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lacey (Certain American States) sets an ambitious, powerful fable of identity and belief in the contemporary American South. An unnamed person with no sense of gender or race ("Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I've been told. I look at my skin and cannot say what shade it is") is found sleeping in a church pew by Steven, Hilda, and their three boys. The family decide to house the mute stranger, whom they name Pew. The action, which takes place over one week, mostly consists of Pew's interactions with the town's residents, who offer one-sided monologues to Pew about their Christian beliefs and believe Pew is their "new jesus." Pew's indeterminate features and the townspeople's habit of projecting onto Pew lead them to see what they want to see, and here Lacey showcases a keen ear for the lilting, sometimes bombastic music of human speech that reveals more than her speakers intend. Pew, meanwhile, bonds with Nelson, a teenage refugee from a war-torn country whose intelligence his caretakers underestimate. Lacey's incisive look at the townspeople's narrow understanding draws a stark contrast with Pew's mute wishes, imagining a life in which "our bodies wouldn't determine our lives, or the lives of others." The action builds toward a mysterious Forgiveness Festival and a memorable climax with disturbing echoes of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" unveiled in a harrowing crescendo of call and response. Lacey's talent shines in this masterful work, her best yet. (May)
Guardian Review
Pitched somewhere between Shirley Jackson's creepy small-town horror and the seminar-room riddling of JM Coetzee, Catherine Lacey's powerful new novel unfolds in a sinister US Bible belt community shaken by the arrival of a mute amnesiac vagrant whose age, sex and race aren't clear. "I'm having trouble lately with remembering," the narrator tells us on the first page - something of an understatement, it turns out. Taken variously as a child or young adult, he or she (the novel is agnostic about the value of such labels) is found asleep in a church, unwilling or unable to answer questions about how they ended up there. Given shelter by a family of five - and named, like a dog, after the place it was found - the new lodger soon causes resentment among the children displaced as a consequence. "He oughta be in the back in there, one of them that picks up the dishes," one son says, giving up his attic room. "It ain't no boy," says another: "She ain't even black neither. Don't know what she is..." "Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I've been told," Pew tells us. While rumour spreads that this mysteriously silent incomer must have suffered terribly, the community's patience proves finite, not least in the case of a local bigwig who calls a public meeting over Pew's refusal to undress for a medical examination ordered to settle the question of whether "God [made] you a boy or a girl", as a clergyman puts it. The novel's glassy cadences and lack of speech marks heighten our sense of the narrator's alienation; anything said to Pew appears in italics, as if filtered from an outside world. All the while, the clock ticks as the story takes place over a week leading up to an ominous-sounding festival for which Pew is advised to prepare (there are dark hints that it involves human sacrifice). Added unease comes from news reports of civil unrest across a county border, where marchers are protesting against a spate of disappearances. Menace lies, above all, in the feeling the community won't tolerate the challenge of Pew's ethnically ambiguous androgyny to its conservative Christianity. A protagonist wiped clean of memory is something of a challenge for a writer, too. It's not entirely convincing when, prior to the festival, Pew tells us that the town's streets "somehow... had that feeling, that holiday feeling - and I wasn't sure how I knew this feeling but I did know it". If the almost unbearable tension more than makes up for the odd misstep, you have to accept a certain solemnity as the price of entry. It's typical when Pew qualifies a remark by telling us: "it only seemed that way to me and I am only one person, ruined by what I have and have not done". Sometimes the narrator's emptiness seems a convenient vessel for Lacey's tendency, shown in her previous novel, The Answers, to drift into dreamy rhetorical questions: "Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?" By coincidence, I happened to read Pew alongside Lionel Shriver's latest novel, which also casts doubt on the wisdom of setting too much store by crude notions of identity, albeit more bluntly. Wrestling more creatively with dilemmas of selfhood, Lacey avoids everyday considerations, which here interest only the narrow-minded townspeople out to have Pew pinned down (or worse) for the sake of what one of them calls "legitimate concerns". "You might know that some people these days like to think a person gets to decide whether they are a boy or a girl," someone tells Pew. "If I could have spoken," Pew tells us, "I could have [answered] that I was human, only missing... a past, a memory of my past, an origin." Live and let live, in other words - but, as this rich, enigmatic novel reminds us, it's rarely that simple.
Kirkus Review
A silent stranger of indeterminate origin is discovered sleeping on a church pew in Lacey's haunting fable about morality and self-delusion. A nice churchgoing family--Hilda, Steven, and their three boys--in the small-town American South stumbles on someone lying down before services on Sunday and agrees to take the stranger in. "Steven and I decided that you can stay with us as long as it takes," Hilda tells the stranger, who responds with silence. The stranger is illegible to them--racially ambiguous, of indeterminate gender, unclear age, no obvious nationality--and as an interim solution, the reverend decides they'll call the stranger Pew, "until you get around to telling us something different." They are kind, at first, and patient. Their questions as to Pew's identity are only meant to help, they say--"we really don't think you've done anything wrong, exactly," and "God loves all his children exactly the same"--but still, they need to know "which one" Pew is, and Pew continues to say nothing. But other people do: Invited by Pew's silence, they begin to confide in Pew, offering sometimes-chilling windows into their past lives. Pew, publicly silent but an acute observer of societal dynamics, is both the novel's narrator and its center, an outside lens into an insular and unsettling world. Pew's only peer is Nelson, adopted by one of the church families from "someplace having a war," a fellow charity case, ill at ease in town. "My whole family was killed in the name of God," he says, "and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding." As the week wears on, tensions begin to rise as the community prepares for its annual "Forgiveness Festival," an ominous cleansing ritual central to the cohesion of the town. "The time right after, everyone's more peaceful," Nelson's mother tells Pew. "Of course right now it's a little more dangerous for everyone." Setting her third novel in a placid town built on a foundation of unspeakable violence, Lacey (Certain American States, 2018, etc.)--spare and elegant as ever--creates a story that feels at the same time mythological and arrestingly like life. Darkly playful; a warning without a moral. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In a religious small town in the American South, a genderless and racially ambiguous figure is found sleeping in a church. A couple takes them home, but the family is quickly unnerved by the figure's indistinct features and silent demeanor. The figure, named Pew by the reverend, is taken to the homes of various townspeople, who individually tell Pew snippets of their lives and their confessions in one-sided conversations. As the townspeople prepare for the Forgiveness Festival, their warm hospitality gives way to suspicion the more they try to figure out what exactly Pew is and where they came from. And the more time Pew spends with these people, the more Pew observes the dark secrets lying underneath the surface of this seemingly unassuming town. Lacey's (The Answers (2017); Certain American States (2018) quietly provocative novel is brilliantly composed. She shines a light on how complicated people are and the dangers of judging others based on appearance, as Pew's ambiguity reveals the true nature of the novel's characters.
Library Journal Review
At the beginning of the week leading up to a small Southern town's yearly high point, a quasi-religious event called the Forgiveness Festival, an individual of indeterminate name, race, age, gender, and biography is found sleeping in the church. Dubbed simply Pew, the stranger is taken in by Hilda and her family, who hope to provide succor and discover the identity and backstory of their guest. The typically mute Pew doesn't cooperate with Hilda's well-meaning attempts to help or with the efforts made by the friends, social workers, and ministers she recruits. Interestingly, those who work with Pew often end up confessing their own sins, fears, and inadequacies to this quiet figure. But as the townsfolk move through the week, their curiosity and good-heartedness begin to turn to fear and suspicion. VERDICT Working with the spiritual and social notions of the stranger and the other, Lacey (The Answers) creates an amorphously Christlike figure who comes to represent whatever people want to see, good or bad. With echoes of some of Shirley Jackson's work, this is a complex, many-faceted fable about religion, hypocrisy, forgiveness, and how society defines social identity. [See Prepub Alert, 11/4/19.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA