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Pew
In a small unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives to a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless, racially ambiguous, and refuses to speak. One family takes the strange visitor in 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 origins. 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 their true nature—as 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.
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 origins. 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 their true nature—as 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.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published July 21, 2020
About the author
Catherine Lacey
27 books1,201 followersCatherine Lacey is the author of five books: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and Biography of X, as well as a story collection, Certain American States.
Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in México.
Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction and the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in México.
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December 31, 2022
Pew is a complex literary novel pressing into obviously one the most popular themes of contemporary literary fiction - the question of identity, surging on the basic postmodernist notion that the totality of the identity is not given - but constructed and unstable, arguing for the non-essential, transient self. As it is seen relatively often in literary fiction, especially and typically in the field of gender, as a lot of characters with ambiguous gender rise, Catherine Lacey in the character of Pew stretch that concept to the most extreme extent - Pew is a person that does not have any of the preconceived notions we use as determinate forces that inevitably shape our identity. Pew is a character whose gender, age, nationality, past, family, race and even name is indeterminate, making Pew the most ambiguous character in the history of literature, the embodiment of central philosophical question of postmodernism, that often strives to obliterate the objective realities of our identity looking at them as a caging elements that stifle the liberation of our more authentic self, that is negotiated, not given. The question the character of Pew poses for each and every person is, who would we be if we had to describe ourselves without any of those categories in which we traditionally view ourselves? Would you be able to describe yourself without talking about your gender, age, nationality, race, family relations and job? What if you, like Pew, had to talk about yourself without any knowledge of your past and any memories to cling to? Do you even have your identity without all that? Is your sense of self really only a social construct?
In light of that mental exercise, Pew's constant silence throughout the book becomes more understandable. Pew does not want to answer a question or - better described, Pew maybe does not even have a way to answer them. The branches of our identity give us a conceptual framework to express ourselves in this world in a way that is understandable to others, cutting off that branches maybe means falling off the tree of traditional society. Destroying categories of identity that could mean robbing the whole generation of the possibility of communicating their inner truth, as Pew is mostly mute.
Seeing Pew reminded me of working with modern teenagers, whose epidemic is their insecurity in their own identity, often based on gender, but reaching even far beyond it, often leaving them uncertain about how they should define who they are in this complex world where there is barely anything solid to cling to.
”What are you?... A horrible question”
Pew is a symbol of a postmodernist movement that often defies any given definition or preconceived determination of identity in categories in which we are used to it, which makes his mere existence subversive because he person who can not be defined by classification, and therefore is a threat to our stability and security that we put in viewing the world and other people through well-known lenses. Pew can make us question the whole nature of reality.
”We ask Pew where they’ve come from—nothing. What he needs—nothing. What happened to him—or her. Quite frankly we still don’t know if Pew is a boy or girl, we don’t know Pew’s age, we don’t know Pew’s real name, or if anyone out there might be missing Pew—and even if we ask any of these things, we get nothing. And there’s not even any agreement about Pew’s heritage, his nationality, her race—everyone’s in disagreement about where Pew might be from and it’s troubling, ain’t it?”
For other characters, Pew becomes a blank slate where all the projections come through - and is it interesting to observe other characters reaction to him/her, from frustration to connection. Interestingly, every single person views Pew differently - some see Pew as a teenage girl, some as an older boy, some as a white person, and some as being browner and better suited for the black community. Pew does not have a name, only a nickname brewed by the community from the only thing we do know about him, that he was found sleeping at the church pew. Interestingly, Pew appears in, at the surface idyllic, but rigid Christian community, that has unsettling atmosphere of eeriness and uncertainty, the cultish vibe of Stepford wives or sinister Omelas (Le Guin's story is quoted in a preface), outer politeness that seems to hide darker secretes, that are never explicitly exposed, but only hinted, culminating in the uncanny ceremony of forgiveness, the books great ambiguous climax. In the ceremony of Forgiveness, the members of society are blindfolded, saying the truth about their sins - there we see that the outer definitions of the identity that seem so firm to us, are used to give the hint of security, as loving husband, respected member of the church and community are not unyielding at all - as resident come clean about one atrocity after other. Lacey also makes a truly subversive statement - even solid identities do not tell us anything about the real truth of a person, of what is lurking beneth the surface, so what is the ultimate use of them? That is the ultimate core position of postmodernism - the reality is not represented in symbols we use, so signs do not have any inherent meaning and significance.
The book itself is very much like Pew, unfinished, somewhat undefined, and like Pew, it gives the reader silent resistance to giving answers. We never learn the truth about Pew, but also, the truth about other people is somewhat hidden, and Pew serves as a catalyzation as the somewhat outcasts of that society make confessions to him that reveal that society is far from ideal, it hides a lot of dark secrets and hypocrisy in heart of what can be viewed as a community with firm moral and religious values, one that is securely grounded and defined - one extreme of rigidity and hypocrisy of identity calling out for the other extreme of obliteration of all objective reality of one’s character.
Much of the book’s philosophy goes into that theoretical postmodernist sense that the self is created in the encounter, as the self awaits individuals in every situation and every situation, the multiple-situational fluctuating selves rather than a one, transsituational, core self as we only get glimpses of Pew from brief encounters he is in.
”Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.”
Both, the cultish community and the character of Pew, stroke in me some feeling of uneasiness and bleakness as if it was two extremes of horrific realities where there is no sense of stability or security. The only things that we get to know about Pew are situational, fragmented images that result in emotional flatness or deathlessness. There is no essence, only a snapshot of images, but there is also the question of how much of the presented essence of others is true.
”What are you? I was sometimes asked and I know it’s rude to answer a question with a question but I have sometimes allowed myself to be rude in this way. I used to ask those askers, What are you? And what a horrible question to say or hear. I regret ever asking it. Sometimes they answered me: I’m a Christian, an American, I’m black, white, not from here, I’m hungry, I’m tired, angry, a woman, a man, a gay man, a pastor, Republican, mother, son, I’m forty-three years old, I’m homeless, or sometimes they answered me with a laugh that rose and fell in their chests before it wandered away, leaving nothing behind.”
No matter what you think about the question of identity, Pew is a symbol of one that is decentered and completely fluid, the embodiment of the postmodern self, one of the most controversial philosophical stances about identity, that can have vast social and political consequences so it has to be thought through as precisely possible and Lacey gave us a quality literary tool for it.
In light of that mental exercise, Pew's constant silence throughout the book becomes more understandable. Pew does not want to answer a question or - better described, Pew maybe does not even have a way to answer them. The branches of our identity give us a conceptual framework to express ourselves in this world in a way that is understandable to others, cutting off that branches maybe means falling off the tree of traditional society. Destroying categories of identity that could mean robbing the whole generation of the possibility of communicating their inner truth, as Pew is mostly mute.
Seeing Pew reminded me of working with modern teenagers, whose epidemic is their insecurity in their own identity, often based on gender, but reaching even far beyond it, often leaving them uncertain about how they should define who they are in this complex world where there is barely anything solid to cling to.
”What are you?... A horrible question”
Pew is a symbol of a postmodernist movement that often defies any given definition or preconceived determination of identity in categories in which we are used to it, which makes his mere existence subversive because he person who can not be defined by classification, and therefore is a threat to our stability and security that we put in viewing the world and other people through well-known lenses. Pew can make us question the whole nature of reality.
”We ask Pew where they’ve come from—nothing. What he needs—nothing. What happened to him—or her. Quite frankly we still don’t know if Pew is a boy or girl, we don’t know Pew’s age, we don’t know Pew’s real name, or if anyone out there might be missing Pew—and even if we ask any of these things, we get nothing. And there’s not even any agreement about Pew’s heritage, his nationality, her race—everyone’s in disagreement about where Pew might be from and it’s troubling, ain’t it?”
For other characters, Pew becomes a blank slate where all the projections come through - and is it interesting to observe other characters reaction to him/her, from frustration to connection. Interestingly, every single person views Pew differently - some see Pew as a teenage girl, some as an older boy, some as a white person, and some as being browner and better suited for the black community. Pew does not have a name, only a nickname brewed by the community from the only thing we do know about him, that he was found sleeping at the church pew. Interestingly, Pew appears in, at the surface idyllic, but rigid Christian community, that has unsettling atmosphere of eeriness and uncertainty, the cultish vibe of Stepford wives or sinister Omelas (Le Guin's story is quoted in a preface), outer politeness that seems to hide darker secretes, that are never explicitly exposed, but only hinted, culminating in the uncanny ceremony of forgiveness, the books great ambiguous climax. In the ceremony of Forgiveness, the members of society are blindfolded, saying the truth about their sins - there we see that the outer definitions of the identity that seem so firm to us, are used to give the hint of security, as loving husband, respected member of the church and community are not unyielding at all - as resident come clean about one atrocity after other. Lacey also makes a truly subversive statement - even solid identities do not tell us anything about the real truth of a person, of what is lurking beneth the surface, so what is the ultimate use of them? That is the ultimate core position of postmodernism - the reality is not represented in symbols we use, so signs do not have any inherent meaning and significance.
The book itself is very much like Pew, unfinished, somewhat undefined, and like Pew, it gives the reader silent resistance to giving answers. We never learn the truth about Pew, but also, the truth about other people is somewhat hidden, and Pew serves as a catalyzation as the somewhat outcasts of that society make confessions to him that reveal that society is far from ideal, it hides a lot of dark secrets and hypocrisy in heart of what can be viewed as a community with firm moral and religious values, one that is securely grounded and defined - one extreme of rigidity and hypocrisy of identity calling out for the other extreme of obliteration of all objective reality of one’s character.
Much of the book’s philosophy goes into that theoretical postmodernist sense that the self is created in the encounter, as the self awaits individuals in every situation and every situation, the multiple-situational fluctuating selves rather than a one, transsituational, core self as we only get glimpses of Pew from brief encounters he is in.
”Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.”
Both, the cultish community and the character of Pew, stroke in me some feeling of uneasiness and bleakness as if it was two extremes of horrific realities where there is no sense of stability or security. The only things that we get to know about Pew are situational, fragmented images that result in emotional flatness or deathlessness. There is no essence, only a snapshot of images, but there is also the question of how much of the presented essence of others is true.
”What are you? I was sometimes asked and I know it’s rude to answer a question with a question but I have sometimes allowed myself to be rude in this way. I used to ask those askers, What are you? And what a horrible question to say or hear. I regret ever asking it. Sometimes they answered me: I’m a Christian, an American, I’m black, white, not from here, I’m hungry, I’m tired, angry, a woman, a man, a gay man, a pastor, Republican, mother, son, I’m forty-three years old, I’m homeless, or sometimes they answered me with a laugh that rose and fell in their chests before it wandered away, leaving nothing behind.”
No matter what you think about the question of identity, Pew is a symbol of one that is decentered and completely fluid, the embodiment of the postmodern self, one of the most controversial philosophical stances about identity, that can have vast social and political consequences so it has to be thought through as precisely possible and Lacey gave us a quality literary tool for it.
December 17, 2019
It’s like a sequence of Rachel Cusk scenes inside a William Gass novel, with a cathartic, wild climax. Excited to talk about this one - more when it comes out. A ferociously 2020 novel and somehow, timeless.
July 26, 2020
I sat thinking about this book for awhile. Easy to ‘surface-read’ - harder to figure out the mystery.
At first I wondered about the obvious things:
.....was Pew a girl or boy?
.....where did Pew come from?
.....what ethnicity was Pew?
.....and —
.....did Pew really have no past memory, or was she just being silent?
Pew ( the given name by the townspeople), from a small American southern town....could not answer the local priest, or anyone what gender she was.
“Once someone said I had a slender neck, a woman’s neck, they recall, a woman’s neck growing from the thick shoulders of a man, but maybe it was the other way around; anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told”.
Then I wondered about the other issues.
.....why did Pew show up in this town, this particular Church?
.....what did the Christian family - parents Hilda & Steve, and their kids each hope to achieve by taking Pew in?
Pew was questioned and evaluated by many. From art therapy, mental health, questioning, and religious inquiry... she was put through the ringer.
Reading Pew - brings thoughts - and thoughts to thoughts....
Greed, love, God....are things children know.... but how do they know these things different from adults?
I tried to ‘really’ explore this question for myself - besides a pat answer.
Pew felt off balanced....”sideways tilt”. As a reader, I, too, was aware of being tilted sideways.
The mystique is odd, eerie, ......but brilliantly unique.
I felt like I was taken into a funhouse with distorted mirrors....( those mirrors that make your reflection appear short and fat or tall and long).....
Was Catherine Lacey wanting readers to look at how wobbly, destructive, and unsteady life is? If yes....I’m looking: honest I am.
And beauty ... what is the conversation we have when it’s mixed with injustice- and other unsettling issues?
There were several scenes that felt very symbolic to me -representing how abstract, and silent life is under our chatter of righteousness and prejudices. Pew pushed the boundaries of comfortableness with her ’thoughts-of-nothingness’....
A TV went white- then blank.
A Heron few away ... body and shape was irrelevant.
“Pew listened to others, but did not listen at the same time”.
Couldn’t we talk about the meaning of this one sentence in further depth?
Small things come with gems. Pew is small-in-size - ( not a long book)... but is huge in contemplation.
By the end... I was left thinking about the spiritual universe. Is there an enlightened approach to forgiveness-impermanence - and a way to deal meaningfully with them.
I can’t say I fully comprehended all that Catherine Lacey wrote....
Not sure we are suppose to....
but her sentences and reflective dialogue were powerfully intriguing.
This little book grew on me....I read and re-read scenes.
Ultimately, I found “Pew” to be an opening fulfilling path to understanding and healing ourselves and finding peace.
At first I wondered about the obvious things:
.....was Pew a girl or boy?
.....where did Pew come from?
.....what ethnicity was Pew?
.....and —
.....did Pew really have no past memory, or was she just being silent?
Pew ( the given name by the townspeople), from a small American southern town....could not answer the local priest, or anyone what gender she was.
“Once someone said I had a slender neck, a woman’s neck, they recall, a woman’s neck growing from the thick shoulders of a man, but maybe it was the other way around; anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told”.
Then I wondered about the other issues.
.....why did Pew show up in this town, this particular Church?
.....what did the Christian family - parents Hilda & Steve, and their kids each hope to achieve by taking Pew in?
Pew was questioned and evaluated by many. From art therapy, mental health, questioning, and religious inquiry... she was put through the ringer.
Reading Pew - brings thoughts - and thoughts to thoughts....
Greed, love, God....are things children know.... but how do they know these things different from adults?
I tried to ‘really’ explore this question for myself - besides a pat answer.
Pew felt off balanced....”sideways tilt”. As a reader, I, too, was aware of being tilted sideways.
The mystique is odd, eerie, ......but brilliantly unique.
I felt like I was taken into a funhouse with distorted mirrors....( those mirrors that make your reflection appear short and fat or tall and long).....
Was Catherine Lacey wanting readers to look at how wobbly, destructive, and unsteady life is? If yes....I’m looking: honest I am.
And beauty ... what is the conversation we have when it’s mixed with injustice- and other unsettling issues?
There were several scenes that felt very symbolic to me -representing how abstract, and silent life is under our chatter of righteousness and prejudices. Pew pushed the boundaries of comfortableness with her ’thoughts-of-nothingness’....
A TV went white- then blank.
A Heron few away ... body and shape was irrelevant.
“Pew listened to others, but did not listen at the same time”.
Couldn’t we talk about the meaning of this one sentence in further depth?
Small things come with gems. Pew is small-in-size - ( not a long book)... but is huge in contemplation.
By the end... I was left thinking about the spiritual universe. Is there an enlightened approach to forgiveness-impermanence - and a way to deal meaningfully with them.
I can’t say I fully comprehended all that Catherine Lacey wrote....
Not sure we are suppose to....
but her sentences and reflective dialogue were powerfully intriguing.
This little book grew on me....I read and re-read scenes.
Ultimately, I found “Pew” to be an opening fulfilling path to understanding and healing ourselves and finding peace.
August 23, 2020
Before
This exquisite little contemporary fable is prefaced by a long quote from Ursula Le Guin’s short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
But don’t read or reread Omelas before reading this book.
And don’t read the spoilered bit of this review or others either until afterwards.
Reviews should avoid plot spoilers (they’re vague in the spoilered section below), but with this story, you want to avoid interpretive spoilers, too.
All you need to know is that it is an observational, introspective, philosophical, and unsentimental story narrated by a voluntary mute who is found asleep on a pew in a church of an idyllic small US town. The parishioners want to help “Pew”, but are unsettled by not knowing, or even agreeing on, anything about Pew - not even their gender, race, or whether teen or young adult.
Read the book without preconceptions, and let Pew paint a unique canvas just for you. Whether impressionist, abstract, classical, or surrealist, and whether portrait, still life, or landscape, the picture you receive won’t be the same as mine, but both will be works of art.
Image: Painter with paint palette. (Source.)
During
Nature abhors a physical vacuum, and people rush to fill gaps of silence and knowledge. Pew’s narration, with a gently escalating sense of unspecified, and maybe imagined, foreboding, tempts the reader to do likewise. Even the period and place have quicksilver qualities.
"Time is somewhere else and what I see here is not the present, but is, instead, the future, an eventual future, and somehow the present moment is back there somewhere I cannot reach and I'm stuck living here, in some future time."
After
Quotes
• "We speak with borrowed air. The sky only seems to be blue and have an edge."
• “A man with hair and skin the color of a dead sky.”
• “I listened to the pencil whispering across the page.”
• “The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.”
• “It began to seem possible that a person might have pains and thoughts that resisted language and had to be transfigured through an instrument, turned into pure sound, spun into the air, and heard.”
Omelas
• You can read Le Guin’s short story in full, HERE.
• You can read my review of it HERE.
Image: Baby goats always raise a smile (Source.)
This exquisite little contemporary fable is prefaced by a long quote from Ursula Le Guin’s short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
But don’t read or reread Omelas before reading this book.
And don’t read the spoilered bit of this review or others either until afterwards.
Reviews should avoid plot spoilers (they’re vague in the spoilered section below), but with this story, you want to avoid interpretive spoilers, too.
All you need to know is that it is an observational, introspective, philosophical, and unsentimental story narrated by a voluntary mute who is found asleep on a pew in a church of an idyllic small US town. The parishioners want to help “Pew”, but are unsettled by not knowing, or even agreeing on, anything about Pew - not even their gender, race, or whether teen or young adult.
Read the book without preconceptions, and let Pew paint a unique canvas just for you. Whether impressionist, abstract, classical, or surrealist, and whether portrait, still life, or landscape, the picture you receive won’t be the same as mine, but both will be works of art.
Image: Painter with paint palette. (Source.)
During
Nature abhors a physical vacuum, and people rush to fill gaps of silence and knowledge. Pew’s narration, with a gently escalating sense of unspecified, and maybe imagined, foreboding, tempts the reader to do likewise. Even the period and place have quicksilver qualities.
"Time is somewhere else and what I see here is not the present, but is, instead, the future, an eventual future, and somehow the present moment is back there somewhere I cannot reach and I'm stuck living here, in some future time."
After
Quotes
• "We speak with borrowed air. The sky only seems to be blue and have an edge."
• “A man with hair and skin the color of a dead sky.”
• “I listened to the pencil whispering across the page.”
• “The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.”
• “It began to seem possible that a person might have pains and thoughts that resisted language and had to be transfigured through an instrument, turned into pure sound, spun into the air, and heard.”
Omelas
• You can read Le Guin’s short story in full, HERE.
• You can read my review of it HERE.
Image: Baby goats always raise a smile (Source.)
August 31, 2023
3.5 stars: I’m not sure how I feel about “Pew” by Catherine Lacey. I enjoyed the beginning; it was the end that left me in a jumbled mess of nothing.
The story illuminates our cultures need to categorize each other. Lacey shows how people find it difficult to interact with and communicate with a person if we do not know their gender, age, race, background, and circumstances. In this story, a person, our narrator who really narrates through thoughts, decides to nap in a church. A family finds him/her/they in “their” pew and decide to be “Christian” and take this individual home. Quickly, it becomes increasingly awkward because our mute narrator doesn’t talk or communicate its age or gender. The pastor of the church declares “its” name “pew” because that’s where “it” was found.
Being mute encourages whoever is with him/her to fill in the quiet space and talk nonstop. Lacey provides the reader with glimpses of other’s souls and feelings as they ramble away to Pew. It’s attractive to talk to someone who will never talk back…to anyone. Souls are borne.
Lacey pokes fun at the Christian people who think they are doing holy things and really are judgmental and not so “Christian”.
The small town where Pew was found has a “Forgiveness Festival” which Lacey builds up through suspense. There was great potential in this Festival, in my opinion, but she left the reader adrift.
I did enjoy how she examined our cultures need for identification and categorization. Pew questions why a person’s body is so important. Why is skin color, sex, age significant?
It’s an interesting concept, writing a novel with a mute narrator who has no identifying characteristics. I didn’t understand why Lacey included the “Forgiveness Festival”.
The story illuminates our cultures need to categorize each other. Lacey shows how people find it difficult to interact with and communicate with a person if we do not know their gender, age, race, background, and circumstances. In this story, a person, our narrator who really narrates through thoughts, decides to nap in a church. A family finds him/her/they in “their” pew and decide to be “Christian” and take this individual home. Quickly, it becomes increasingly awkward because our mute narrator doesn’t talk or communicate its age or gender. The pastor of the church declares “its” name “pew” because that’s where “it” was found.
Being mute encourages whoever is with him/her to fill in the quiet space and talk nonstop. Lacey provides the reader with glimpses of other’s souls and feelings as they ramble away to Pew. It’s attractive to talk to someone who will never talk back…to anyone. Souls are borne.
Lacey pokes fun at the Christian people who think they are doing holy things and really are judgmental and not so “Christian”.
The small town where Pew was found has a “Forgiveness Festival” which Lacey builds up through suspense. There was great potential in this Festival, in my opinion, but she left the reader adrift.
I did enjoy how she examined our cultures need for identification and categorization. Pew questions why a person’s body is so important. Why is skin color, sex, age significant?
It’s an interesting concept, writing a novel with a mute narrator who has no identifying characteristics. I didn’t understand why Lacey included the “Forgiveness Festival”.
October 17, 2022
A poetic and unsettling book that defies easy definition as does it’s namesake main character
You’re right not to say anything. They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they’ll use it against you.
Race, gender, empathy, compassion, conformity and community (for the right sort of people and with not too much cost involved), adoption, self righteousness, silence, confessions, how everyone is uncertain, broken inside and disguised to the outside.
Pew has a short title and not many pages but takes on a lot of themes. The feel of this book is a bit like the horror movies we are all familiar with: small town, secrets hidden. A lot of references to a ceremony in the society feel like a direct reference to The Lottery of Shirley Jackson. Main character Pew just appears one day (and is implied to be in some way linked to the short story of Ursula K. Le Guin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One...)
Pew defies labelling, and gets to be passed around in the small town community that tries its best to show compassion as dictated by their faith. Many outcasts of the community start to confess secrets to Pew, which start of strong and chilling (with an example of murderous racism lurking just beneath the veneer of society) but kind of blend into each other through the book, since none of the ancillary characters come much into focus. In that sense the book has a more parable like quality than that it is a deep psychological portrait.
We accept and support you, is something that is often said to Pew during the book. But clearly terms and conditions apply, and the more the main character eludes labelling, the more the fear of the other overtakes the Christian principles. Along the way we as readers are shown quite terrifying examples of demagoguery and dynamics in masses, but in the end the story Catherine Lacey tells shows a possibility of healing.
The ending of the book is not something that stuck with me, but Lacey her writing really is the thing that elevate this book above similar concept like recent works, for instance The Parade from Dave Eggers or Silence Once Begun from Jesse Ball who coincidentally is the partner of Lacey.
Some quotes that stuck with me are included below:
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?
But at some point you have to ask yourself, Roger said, whether remaining silent is something that is having a positive effect or a negative one on your life. You have to ask yourself whether it’s something you’re doing or something that’s being done to you, from the inside, from something else.
You’re right not to say anything. They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they’ll use it against you.
Steven wrapped a hand around one of her wrists, which seemed to end something in her.
I did not watch the television after that, though I felt all the televisions were watching me.
He sounded both angry and happy, pleased with himself and displeased with the world.
I stood still in the room but I was not in the room.
It’s all we have here - sitting right with the community. It’s all anyone wants.
It would simply be a matter of what is best for you. What is decided to be best for you.
It didn’t matter what was said, not this time. A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.
Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting.
Did she feel she’d wronged or been wronged more in her life? Did anyone ever know which was true? How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much more harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?
You’re right not to say anything. They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they’ll use it against you.
Race, gender, empathy, compassion, conformity and community (for the right sort of people and with not too much cost involved), adoption, self righteousness, silence, confessions, how everyone is uncertain, broken inside and disguised to the outside.
Pew has a short title and not many pages but takes on a lot of themes. The feel of this book is a bit like the horror movies we are all familiar with: small town, secrets hidden. A lot of references to a ceremony in the society feel like a direct reference to The Lottery of Shirley Jackson. Main character Pew just appears one day (and is implied to be in some way linked to the short story of Ursula K. Le Guin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One...)
Pew defies labelling, and gets to be passed around in the small town community that tries its best to show compassion as dictated by their faith. Many outcasts of the community start to confess secrets to Pew, which start of strong and chilling (with an example of murderous racism lurking just beneath the veneer of society) but kind of blend into each other through the book, since none of the ancillary characters come much into focus. In that sense the book has a more parable like quality than that it is a deep psychological portrait.
We accept and support you, is something that is often said to Pew during the book. But clearly terms and conditions apply, and the more the main character eludes labelling, the more the fear of the other overtakes the Christian principles. Along the way we as readers are shown quite terrifying examples of demagoguery and dynamics in masses, but in the end the story Catherine Lacey tells shows a possibility of healing.
The ending of the book is not something that stuck with me, but Lacey her writing really is the thing that elevate this book above similar concept like recent works, for instance The Parade from Dave Eggers or Silence Once Begun from Jesse Ball who coincidentally is the partner of Lacey.
Some quotes that stuck with me are included below:
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?
But at some point you have to ask yourself, Roger said, whether remaining silent is something that is having a positive effect or a negative one on your life. You have to ask yourself whether it’s something you’re doing or something that’s being done to you, from the inside, from something else.
You’re right not to say anything. They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they’ll use it against you.
Steven wrapped a hand around one of her wrists, which seemed to end something in her.
I did not watch the television after that, though I felt all the televisions were watching me.
He sounded both angry and happy, pleased with himself and displeased with the world.
I stood still in the room but I was not in the room.
It’s all we have here - sitting right with the community. It’s all anyone wants.
It would simply be a matter of what is best for you. What is decided to be best for you.
It didn’t matter what was said, not this time. A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.
Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting.
Did she feel she’d wronged or been wronged more in her life? Did anyone ever know which was true? How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much more harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?
July 21, 2020
"The only reason I've gone to a church was to sleep...a church is a structure with walls ...a roof...pretty windows...you can't see outside...but...it can keep the outside far from you...I woke up on a pew, sleeping on my side, knees bent". Discovered by Hilda and Steven Bonner, they decided to host "Pew", a nameless person of indeterminate gender, race, and age. Members of this small insular, God fearing community were expected to be kind and compassionate. Pew thinks, "I had known hunger so well and for so long...but now faced with all this, I could hardly eat...I wished I could have reached back and given one [of the meals to myself in]... those days of hunger in the past".
Compassion turned to frustration and distrust. When asked,"did God make you a boy or girl?" No response. "...if I could have spoken...been loosened from the grip of memory...a past, a memory of my past, an origin...what a freedom that was, and what a burden that was..." Approached by community members trying to engage him/her in conversation, Pew's silence was deafening.
In first person narration, Pew highlights his role as confessor, being non-conversational, possibly by choice, allows the speaker to escape judgement. Take Mrs. Gladstone. "Her face...'peace and terror tangled together'...", as she tells Pew about her husband's deathbed confession. A newer member of the community, Roger asks, "[is} remaining silent...having a positive effect or a negative one on your life?" Over the course of a week, some churchgoers feel Pew was sent there for a reason, others find his presence ominous. Saturday will be the yearly "Forgiveness Festival", a ritual embraced by many. Pew needs to be prepared for the upcoming day.
"Pew" by Catherine Leary uses the ruminations of Pew to provide commentary on the absurdity of humans. "[People] hear what they want...everyone knew everyone and they all belonged to one another. There was a certainty, a clarity...". Pew defied definition. "...we know we haven't always been fair to everyone...But we've always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time". This short, powerful tome is unsettling. "Everywhere you turn, people are hurt...All this bitterness. everyone wants to be the one who's right". A novel for our times!
Thank you Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Compassion turned to frustration and distrust. When asked,"did God make you a boy or girl?" No response. "...if I could have spoken...been loosened from the grip of memory...a past, a memory of my past, an origin...what a freedom that was, and what a burden that was..." Approached by community members trying to engage him/her in conversation, Pew's silence was deafening.
In first person narration, Pew highlights his role as confessor, being non-conversational, possibly by choice, allows the speaker to escape judgement. Take Mrs. Gladstone. "Her face...'peace and terror tangled together'...", as she tells Pew about her husband's deathbed confession. A newer member of the community, Roger asks, "[is} remaining silent...having a positive effect or a negative one on your life?" Over the course of a week, some churchgoers feel Pew was sent there for a reason, others find his presence ominous. Saturday will be the yearly "Forgiveness Festival", a ritual embraced by many. Pew needs to be prepared for the upcoming day.
"Pew" by Catherine Leary uses the ruminations of Pew to provide commentary on the absurdity of humans. "[People] hear what they want...everyone knew everyone and they all belonged to one another. There was a certainty, a clarity...". Pew defied definition. "...we know we haven't always been fair to everyone...But we've always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time". This short, powerful tome is unsettling. "Everywhere you turn, people are hurt...All this bitterness. everyone wants to be the one who's right". A novel for our times!
Thank you Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Net Galley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
November 21, 2020
What an odd little book this was. Thought provoking, unsettling, and somehow quite wonderful. The value we put on the look of an individual, judging, always judging. Gender, race, age, origin - well nigh impossible to decipher with Pew. If you welcome endings in which the author is comfortable with allowing her readers to use their imaginations, you can run wild with this one. The ambiguity of Pew is awesome.
May 8, 2020
A small Southern town. A church loving community that prides itself on doing the right thing, raising their children the right way. Going about their lives in a predictable fashion, until something unpredictable happens. Attending church, they are confronted by a stranger, a young person sleeping in one of the pews. They can't tell what sex the person is, his old he is, they even disagree on his color. Who is it, where did this person come from? No one knows and this person won't or can't speak. Doing the right thing, a family takes him home. Christian charity, opening their house, and hoping they can get some answers. They name the person Pew, after the place where he/she was found.
What happens after this as Pew goes from family to family, is the story. How he is treated, what people say and since this is a first
Person narration, we learn thoughts directly from Pew.All this leads up to the Churches forgivness festival, a strange ceremony indeed. The denoument, the ending I will leave up to future readers. Strange days indeed.
Beautifully written, with universal themes, Judging a person by the way one looks, and how someone that cannot be defined can cause discomfort and suspicion. I liked this, a very different type of story. One that makes the reader think.
ARC from Edelweiss.
What happens after this as Pew goes from family to family, is the story. How he is treated, what people say and since this is a first
Person narration, we learn thoughts directly from Pew.All this leads up to the Churches forgivness festival, a strange ceremony indeed. The denoument, the ending I will leave up to future readers. Strange days indeed.
Beautifully written, with universal themes, Judging a person by the way one looks, and how someone that cannot be defined can cause discomfort and suspicion. I liked this, a very different type of story. One that makes the reader think.
ARC from Edelweiss.
May 16, 2020
In a small insular and religious town, a stranger is found asleep in the church. The young person, of ambiguous gender and race, refuses to speak, and so is named ‘Pew’ after the place they were found.
That description hooked me enough to pick up Catherine Lacey’s Pew. As I began to read, I found to my delight that it also blends the influence of Carson McCullers and Jesse Ball with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”.
This slim novel is sensitive and thoughtful, written in a simple, poetic but unfussy style. I enjoyed reading it quite a lot, as it follows Pew over the course of a week leading up to the town’s ‘Forgiveness Festival’. Pew’s refusal to speak allows the townspeople to open up in order to fill the void; one by one, they pour their stories out as Pew becomes almost a confessor. It is a terrific way to structure a novel.
As an homage, it is rather lovely and skilfully done. But by the end, I felt that it followed in the tradition of its predecessors a little too closely. Perhaps ironically, I wanted Pew to be its own unique self just a tiny bit more. 3.5 stars.
That description hooked me enough to pick up Catherine Lacey’s Pew. As I began to read, I found to my delight that it also blends the influence of Carson McCullers and Jesse Ball with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Ursula K Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”.
This slim novel is sensitive and thoughtful, written in a simple, poetic but unfussy style. I enjoyed reading it quite a lot, as it follows Pew over the course of a week leading up to the town’s ‘Forgiveness Festival’. Pew’s refusal to speak allows the townspeople to open up in order to fill the void; one by one, they pour their stories out as Pew becomes almost a confessor. It is a terrific way to structure a novel.
As an homage, it is rather lovely and skilfully done. But by the end, I felt that it followed in the tradition of its predecessors a little too closely. Perhaps ironically, I wanted Pew to be its own unique self just a tiny bit more. 3.5 stars.
July 24, 2020
This short novel cleverly explores compassion, religion and the human longing to categorize others in order to feel safe and comfortable. The title-giving Pew is a young person of indeterminate gender, race, class and birthplace who mostly refuses to speak, thus not giving their surroundings the possibility to easily ascribe certain qualities and traits to them. Reminiscient of Bartleby the Scrivener, they refuse to participate in society the way they are expected to - this act of resistance is both rooted in their belief that people should not be judged by superficial categories, and the conviction that language is ultimately failing to properly capture and express thoughts ("a word is put down as a place holder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries").
At the beginning of the novel, our protagonist is discovered sleeping in a church pew, and a family offers them to stay in their home. The small community names the visitor Pew after the place where they were found, and the church members try to find out who Pew is and what happened to them. As Pew mostly does not respond, people just go on talking -some because they are unsettled by the silence, some because they enjoy that someone is listening without judging or interrupting. Pew becomes both a confessor and a source of contention, as for many people, Pew's refusal to explain themselves is hard to bear. The villager who becomes closest to Pew is a young refugee from a war-torn country who does speak, but, as a brown-skinned foreigner from a poor and ravaged region, is not taken seriously by most inhabitants. As the date for the enigmatic "forgiveness festival" approaches (hello, The Lottery), the reader starts to question which role Pew is supposed to play there...
Told over the course of one week, this compact text offers insights into the minds of various characters who speak about love, loss, racism, faith, family, guilt, and loneliness - Lacey just lets them talk, sometimes rambling, sometimes painfully, sometimes insincerely. As we listen from Pew's point of view, their open and often child-like outlook exposes faults and insecurities without ridiculing them. The novel is dedicated to Jesse Ball, and not only is Ball's classic theme of human compassion vs. human cruelty at the center of the story (see Ball's Census), some of Pew's observations are directly linked to Sleep, Death's Brother, and the festival is reminiscent of the ritual in Ball's The Divers' Game. Pew himself sounds like they could be related to the young protagonist in How to Set a Fire and Why, although they take a different approach to counter human shortcomings.
Pew knows that people and their words can be dangerous: "A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see." This novel is full of poetic sensibilty and finds a unusual voice that highlights the everyday absurdity of human behavior. Intelligent and compassionate, this text is a real treat.
At the beginning of the novel, our protagonist is discovered sleeping in a church pew, and a family offers them to stay in their home. The small community names the visitor Pew after the place where they were found, and the church members try to find out who Pew is and what happened to them. As Pew mostly does not respond, people just go on talking -some because they are unsettled by the silence, some because they enjoy that someone is listening without judging or interrupting. Pew becomes both a confessor and a source of contention, as for many people, Pew's refusal to explain themselves is hard to bear. The villager who becomes closest to Pew is a young refugee from a war-torn country who does speak, but, as a brown-skinned foreigner from a poor and ravaged region, is not taken seriously by most inhabitants. As the date for the enigmatic "forgiveness festival" approaches (hello, The Lottery), the reader starts to question which role Pew is supposed to play there...
Told over the course of one week, this compact text offers insights into the minds of various characters who speak about love, loss, racism, faith, family, guilt, and loneliness - Lacey just lets them talk, sometimes rambling, sometimes painfully, sometimes insincerely. As we listen from Pew's point of view, their open and often child-like outlook exposes faults and insecurities without ridiculing them. The novel is dedicated to Jesse Ball, and not only is Ball's classic theme of human compassion vs. human cruelty at the center of the story (see Ball's Census), some of Pew's observations are directly linked to Sleep, Death's Brother, and the festival is reminiscent of the ritual in Ball's The Divers' Game. Pew himself sounds like they could be related to the young protagonist in How to Set a Fire and Why, although they take a different approach to counter human shortcomings.
Pew knows that people and their words can be dangerous: "A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see." This novel is full of poetic sensibilty and finds a unusual voice that highlights the everyday absurdity of human behavior. Intelligent and compassionate, this text is a real treat.
August 7, 2020
Catherine Lacey, queen of the liminal world.
March 25, 2021
Now shortlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.
I am sure like many people on this site I have performed many job interviews – I have been on training courses and observed other’s interviewing, and looked for good interviewing techniques: open ended questions, competency-based assessments, reflective listening, questions about most recent appraisals, DIY-360s, for example, are all things I have adopted into my standard practices. But the most effective technique I have learnt is silence: ask a question, allow the interviewee to answer and then simply stay silent: most interviewees will automatically fill the gap by extending their answer and normally in their subsequent thoughts move away from their prepared response and reveal their actual thoughts and candid views.
It is this principle, together with the seemingly unquenchable human desire to draw boundaries (often but not exclusively based on physical characteristics – as set out in the opening quote) that lies at the central foundation of this book.
The story is set in an unnamed town in the American South (we assume in the author’s native Mississippi). An almost entirely silent stranger of indeterminate sex, race and (to a lesser extent) age is discovered sleeping on a pew in the town church. It is the week before the major annual event in the cycle of the small town’s traditional, closed, church-based, white, community – the Forgiveness Festival, and despite (or perhaps because of) this and the tension it engenders amongst them, the people decide to take in the stranger (who – Paddington style - they christen Pew). They say they want to assist Pew but want to begin with determining their sex, race and age so that the assistance can be appropriate both for Pew and those who help Pew.
But as Pew does not respond to, or collaborate with their efforts, the townsfolk’s interactions with her quickly lead to them talking about themselves. The book is written in the first person, but unlike in say Rachel Cusk’s recent trilogy, where Faye’s indirect reportage of other’s speech is actually a way to reveal the truth of her own life, here the thoughts of the town’s people are revealing of themselves only, hinting at the secrets and tensions which underpin their community – Pew themselves remains an enigma both to the reader and to themselves.
Pew’s real skill, alongside her silence, is to identify what she calls the “silent things in people”, to “see through those masks meant to protect a person’s wants and unmet needs.” – often gaining a strong first impression of what really lies at the heart of a person’s behaviour, posture, appearance and speech.
It is hugely to the author’s credit that she can make an effectively absent narrator one that is so present to the reader.
This is a book whose central message is as enigmatic, immune to simply delineation and open to interpretation as its narrator.
And perhaps I think most fascinating of all - just as Pew's silence holds up a mirror to those she meets, I think inevitably reviews of this book may say more about the reviewer than the book.
However I want to comment briefly on three areas:
The Ones Who Walk Way from Omelas
The first is the book’s epigraph – taken from the ending (importantly I think not the body) of Ursula Le Guin’s brilliant short story “The Ones Who Walk Way from Omelas”.
Pew themselves is clearly connected to Omelas – a flashback makes that clear – although in what way is not clear: is Pew a freed scapegoat child (the one whose imagined miserable post freedom life serves to justify their continued detention and punishment); or is Pew one who gazed on the child, and walked away from Omelas, searching for the hard to imagine different place.
At one point, and expanding the cell in which the Omelas child is trapped into a different form of being trapped in a cell, Pew speculates
Later, when the townsfolk make a call on Pew’s race and temporarily move her to the black side of town, she meets the mother of a missing child, a child who Walked Away from the town, in this case it seems starting from a visit to a zoo (again an incident of viewing something trapped in a cell, a refusal to subscribe to societal norms of division, to accepting the subjugation of others – in this case not just zoo animals but livestock – as the necessary underpinning of its happiness)
And in the book’s acknowledgements the author quotes the environmental activist David Buckel and his self-immolation as an act of walking away from Omelas.
And finally how does one interpret the ending of the book and the reappearance of Annie - Annie who argued about male/female dichotomy, read a book on revolutionary self-immolation and wrote an essay about the overthrow of capitalism.
Jesse Ball
The same acknowledgments quote her partner Jesse Ball as “a mysterious weather pattern that has never been directly observed and can only be measured by its aftermath”.
I find it fascinating to see two writers whose work seems so clearly to be in dialogue with the other’s.
It is hard not to reflect (not least for its title) on Ball’s “Silence Once Begun” when reading this novel, or “Census” (where the ways in which people interact with the Census-taker’s Down’s syndrome Son says so much about them).
But similarly and given the earlier conception of this novel, its not hard to see how the Festival of Forgiveness informed the jubilee-style Ogia’s Day in “The Diver’s Game” or that the townspeople’s views on Pew (at times considering her an archangel or even second coming, allowing her to witness their shared confessions) has echoes in that book’s Day of the Infanta.
#BLM
The time in which the book is set is unspecified and there is a reference to changing views of morality
We know we haven’t always been fair to everyone. Certainly—no. But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.
But there are also echoes that whenever the book is set – 2020, 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_...) , 1963 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/19...) – somethings tragically do not alter.
Highly recommended.
My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.
I leaned back across the table and shut my eyes and thought that at some point in the future, long after humanity had run its course, after some other creature had replaced us, maybe, or maybe even after the next creatures had been replaced by whatever came after them, at some point in a future I could not fully imagine, a question might occur in some mind, and that question might be What was the human? What was the world of the human?—……. and if this question ever did arise in that future being’s mind, would it even be possible to catalog and make sense of all our griefs, our pains and wars? Our delineations? Our need for order? The question arose then—did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter? Why did they cause so much trouble for us? Why did we use them against one another? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything? Why did we draw our conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so mercurial?
I am sure like many people on this site I have performed many job interviews – I have been on training courses and observed other’s interviewing, and looked for good interviewing techniques: open ended questions, competency-based assessments, reflective listening, questions about most recent appraisals, DIY-360s, for example, are all things I have adopted into my standard practices. But the most effective technique I have learnt is silence: ask a question, allow the interviewee to answer and then simply stay silent: most interviewees will automatically fill the gap by extending their answer and normally in their subsequent thoughts move away from their prepared response and reveal their actual thoughts and candid views.
It is this principle, together with the seemingly unquenchable human desire to draw boundaries (often but not exclusively based on physical characteristics – as set out in the opening quote) that lies at the central foundation of this book.
The story is set in an unnamed town in the American South (we assume in the author’s native Mississippi). An almost entirely silent stranger of indeterminate sex, race and (to a lesser extent) age is discovered sleeping on a pew in the town church. It is the week before the major annual event in the cycle of the small town’s traditional, closed, church-based, white, community – the Forgiveness Festival, and despite (or perhaps because of) this and the tension it engenders amongst them, the people decide to take in the stranger (who – Paddington style - they christen Pew). They say they want to assist Pew but want to begin with determining their sex, race and age so that the assistance can be appropriate both for Pew and those who help Pew.
But as Pew does not respond to, or collaborate with their efforts, the townsfolk’s interactions with her quickly lead to them talking about themselves. The book is written in the first person, but unlike in say Rachel Cusk’s recent trilogy, where Faye’s indirect reportage of other’s speech is actually a way to reveal the truth of her own life, here the thoughts of the town’s people are revealing of themselves only, hinting at the secrets and tensions which underpin their community – Pew themselves remains an enigma both to the reader and to themselves.
Pew’s real skill, alongside her silence, is to identify what she calls the “silent things in people”, to “see through those masks meant to protect a person’s wants and unmet needs.” – often gaining a strong first impression of what really lies at the heart of a person’s behaviour, posture, appearance and speech.
It is hugely to the author’s credit that she can make an effectively absent narrator one that is so present to the reader.
This is a book whose central message is as enigmatic, immune to simply delineation and open to interpretation as its narrator.
And perhaps I think most fascinating of all - just as Pew's silence holds up a mirror to those she meets, I think inevitably reviews of this book may say more about the reviewer than the book.
However I want to comment briefly on three areas:
The Ones Who Walk Way from Omelas
The first is the book’s epigraph – taken from the ending (importantly I think not the body) of Ursula Le Guin’s brilliant short story “The Ones Who Walk Way from Omelas”.
Pew themselves is clearly connected to Omelas – a flashback makes that clear – although in what way is not clear: is Pew a freed scapegoat child (the one whose imagined miserable post freedom life serves to justify their continued detention and punishment); or is Pew one who gazed on the child, and walked away from Omelas, searching for the hard to imagine different place.
At one point, and expanding the cell in which the Omelas child is trapped into a different form of being trapped in a cell, Pew speculates
I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight. ….. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.
Later, when the townsfolk make a call on Pew’s race and temporarily move her to the black side of town, she meets the mother of a missing child, a child who Walked Away from the town, in this case it seems starting from a visit to a zoo (again an incident of viewing something trapped in a cell, a refusal to subscribe to societal norms of division, to accepting the subjugation of others – in this case not just zoo animals but livestock – as the necessary underpinning of its happiness)
they weren’t any different from him either and he was just so sure about it. It was causing him pain, this idea, it was clearly upsetting him, all those animals locked up, but I didn’t know what to do about it. He couldn’t be reasoned with. Even as a little boy. He had his ideas and he held them.
And in the book’s acknowledgements the author quotes the environmental activist David Buckel and his self-immolation as an act of walking away from Omelas.
And finally how does one interpret the ending of the book and the reappearance of Annie - Annie who argued about male/female dichotomy, read a book on revolutionary self-immolation and wrote an essay about the overthrow of capitalism.
Jesse Ball
The same acknowledgments quote her partner Jesse Ball as “a mysterious weather pattern that has never been directly observed and can only be measured by its aftermath”.
I find it fascinating to see two writers whose work seems so clearly to be in dialogue with the other’s.
It is hard not to reflect (not least for its title) on Ball’s “Silence Once Begun” when reading this novel, or “Census” (where the ways in which people interact with the Census-taker’s Down’s syndrome Son says so much about them).
But similarly and given the earlier conception of this novel, its not hard to see how the Festival of Forgiveness informed the jubilee-style Ogia’s Day in “The Diver’s Game” or that the townspeople’s views on Pew (at times considering her an archangel or even second coming, allowing her to witness their shared confessions) has echoes in that book’s Day of the Infanta.
#BLM
The time in which the book is set is unspecified and there is a reference to changing views of morality
We know we haven’t always been fair to everyone. Certainly—no. But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.
But there are also echoes that whenever the book is set – 2020, 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_...) , 1963 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/19...) – somethings tragically do not alter.
Highly recommended.
My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.
February 26, 2023
A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence. I stayed silent.
In Catherine Lacey's fable-like new novel a stranger arrives in a close-knit community, one where religion plays a big part. They are discovered during a Sunday service, where they had been sleeping overnight in a church pew. Where they are from and who they are is a mystery not just to the townspeople but also to themselves, Lacey taking the artistically brave decision to use a first person narrator:
Really, whatever you’d like to be called, that’s all we’re asking. I didn’t want to be called anything.
...
All I could have told the Reverend, if I could have spoken, was that I was human just as he was human, only missing a few things he seemed to think I needed— a past, a memory of my past, an origin— I had none of that. I felt I wasn’t the only one, that there must have been others, that I was a part of a “we,” only I didn’t know where they were . We were and I was, not entirely alone. Maybe we were all looking for one another without knowing it.
In the absence of another name, they are given the name Pew and invited to live with the family who first discovered them. They are taken to meet a wide range of the community, in the hope that someone will encourage them to open up. But while these others often project their own situation onto Pew, Pew remains largely silent, only very occasionally speaking and then only briefly, usually to those who are themselves outsiders.
The biggest frustration for the locals is their inability to pin Pew down - even their age (an adolescent or a young adult?), gender or race:
We ask Pew where they’ve come from—nothing. What he needs—nothing. What happened to him—or her. Quite frankly we still don’t know if Pew is a boy or girl, we don’t know Pew’s age, we don’t know Pew’s real name, or if anyone out there might be missing Pew—and even if we ask any of these things, we get nothing. And there’s not even any agreement about Pew’s heritage, his nationality, her race—everyone’s in disagreement about where Pew might be from and it’s troubling, ain’t it?
whereas in the community itself, at least on the surface :
everyone knew everyone and they all belonged to one another. There was a certainty, a clarity, a real joy, that fused them all into one, into one massive entity, the weight of their years all pressed together, thousands of years in the room, all together like that, entwined with one another, no distance between any of them, no loneliness, no solitude— and it was easy to see, just then, how intensely one could want to belong here.
Although the reader's experience from some of Pew's encounters with individuals might suggest otherwise, encounters which have element of Rachel Cusk's Outline, albeit here there is a crucial difference, we learn much more about the community than about Pew - whereas one suspects Cusk's narrator is projecting her own issues on those whose stories she reports, here others project their issues, and prejudices, onto Pew.
But Pew ultimately yearns for a different world:
I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight. For a few moments I forgot where I was. I finished the glass of milk without realizing it, lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn’t end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking and was not alive if not thinking. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.
The town is particularly tense due to mysterious disappearances over in the neighbouring county and the approach of an annual, ritualised, Festival taking place at the end of the week. The chapters of the novel are based on days of the week, leading to the Festival itself on the Saturday, giving the novel an ominous tone.
As for what the Festival constitutes and how the novel ends, no spoilers here, but it is in any case open to interpretation, indeed it treads a slightly uneasy path between a deliberate open ending (which I would prefer, although it does seem to have left many reviewers unsatisfied) and giving one particular slant in terms of the book's main message.
This comment from one of the community suggests one key theme: we know we haven’t always been fair to everyone. Certainly— no. But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time. And there is an related and explicit link to the failings of a justice system based on confessions under duress, a theme of Jesse Ball's (see below) Silence Once Begun (see also this Guardian review https://www.theguardian.com/books/202... which the author herself as endorsed as capturing what she intended by the book)
There is also a very direct and clever nod to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (a quote from which forms the epigraph) when Pew does, towards the novel's end, recover one seeming memory:
I began to both remember and lose the shape of the years that had led me here. I could remember a low, windowless room. Three paces by two paces. A damp floor. The taste of blood. A child.
which is a very direct lift from the room in Le Guin's story (a textual cross-over between stories, a dream, a memory from Pew of reading the book, a coincidence?) .And the Guardian review highlights two more subtle allusions relating to the novel's ending that would otherwise have passed me by.
Indeed this is a novel where I felt 'spoilers' actually enhance the experience - I'd strongly suggest reading the Guardian review, I would even suggest before the book, but certainly afterwards.
The novel is dedicated to Jesse Ball, Lacey's partner, and includes the wonderful acknowledgement Jesse Ball is a mysterious weather pattern that has never been directly observed and can only be measured by its aftermath. It certainly shares similarities with his fable-like yet highly political stories, although she doesn't follow his trademark approach of writing a book in a few days and then not revising it, telling an interviewer:
The first draft took about two months. I read it several months later and found that most of it was bad, so I rewrote it quickly. I repeated this process five or six times between 2016 and 2019, and eventually found that when I had my main character listen to other characters, it made the creation and deletion of dozens of pages much easier. It was as if—oh, I didn’t write that, I just heard someone say it. (from https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...)
indeed Lacey recalled in a recorded conversation between them (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jes...) that pretty much the first thing she ever said to Ball was “I’ve heard about your methods, and I find them suspicious.”
But if I had one issue with the novel, it is that it did seem to rely on an unfavourable caricature of institutionalised religion, albeit one the author has suggested is rooted in her own upbringing.
Artistically too, as a number of reviewers have noted, it may lean a little too heavily on Le Guin and Shirley Jackson (the overlaps with Ball's novels are more a case of mutual influence). This interview from 2018 was interesting in that regard (https://theadroitjournal.org/2018/09/...) as the Le Guin influence is clearly very deliberate here:
Overall though a fascinating novel - 4 stars for for amount it made me think although I preferred her debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing. Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
In Catherine Lacey's fable-like new novel a stranger arrives in a close-knit community, one where religion plays a big part. They are discovered during a Sunday service, where they had been sleeping overnight in a church pew. Where they are from and who they are is a mystery not just to the townspeople but also to themselves, Lacey taking the artistically brave decision to use a first person narrator:
Really, whatever you’d like to be called, that’s all we’re asking. I didn’t want to be called anything.
...
All I could have told the Reverend, if I could have spoken, was that I was human just as he was human, only missing a few things he seemed to think I needed— a past, a memory of my past, an origin— I had none of that. I felt I wasn’t the only one, that there must have been others, that I was a part of a “we,” only I didn’t know where they were . We were and I was, not entirely alone. Maybe we were all looking for one another without knowing it.
In the absence of another name, they are given the name Pew and invited to live with the family who first discovered them. They are taken to meet a wide range of the community, in the hope that someone will encourage them to open up. But while these others often project their own situation onto Pew, Pew remains largely silent, only very occasionally speaking and then only briefly, usually to those who are themselves outsiders.
The biggest frustration for the locals is their inability to pin Pew down - even their age (an adolescent or a young adult?), gender or race:
We ask Pew where they’ve come from—nothing. What he needs—nothing. What happened to him—or her. Quite frankly we still don’t know if Pew is a boy or girl, we don’t know Pew’s age, we don’t know Pew’s real name, or if anyone out there might be missing Pew—and even if we ask any of these things, we get nothing. And there’s not even any agreement about Pew’s heritage, his nationality, her race—everyone’s in disagreement about where Pew might be from and it’s troubling, ain’t it?
whereas in the community itself, at least on the surface :
everyone knew everyone and they all belonged to one another. There was a certainty, a clarity, a real joy, that fused them all into one, into one massive entity, the weight of their years all pressed together, thousands of years in the room, all together like that, entwined with one another, no distance between any of them, no loneliness, no solitude— and it was easy to see, just then, how intensely one could want to belong here.
Although the reader's experience from some of Pew's encounters with individuals might suggest otherwise, encounters which have element of Rachel Cusk's Outline, albeit here there is a crucial difference, we learn much more about the community than about Pew - whereas one suspects Cusk's narrator is projecting her own issues on those whose stories she reports, here others project their issues, and prejudices, onto Pew.
But Pew ultimately yearns for a different world:
I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight. For a few moments I forgot where I was. I finished the glass of milk without realizing it, lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn’t end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking and was not alive if not thinking. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.
The town is particularly tense due to mysterious disappearances over in the neighbouring county and the approach of an annual, ritualised, Festival taking place at the end of the week. The chapters of the novel are based on days of the week, leading to the Festival itself on the Saturday, giving the novel an ominous tone.
As for what the Festival constitutes and how the novel ends, no spoilers here, but it is in any case open to interpretation, indeed it treads a slightly uneasy path between a deliberate open ending (which I would prefer, although it does seem to have left many reviewers unsatisfied) and giving one particular slant in terms of the book's main message.
This comment from one of the community suggests one key theme: we know we haven’t always been fair to everyone. Certainly— no. But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time. And there is an related and explicit link to the failings of a justice system based on confessions under duress, a theme of Jesse Ball's (see below) Silence Once Begun (see also this Guardian review https://www.theguardian.com/books/202... which the author herself as endorsed as capturing what she intended by the book)
There is also a very direct and clever nod to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (a quote from which forms the epigraph) when Pew does, towards the novel's end, recover one seeming memory:
I began to both remember and lose the shape of the years that had led me here. I could remember a low, windowless room. Three paces by two paces. A damp floor. The taste of blood. A child.
which is a very direct lift from the room in Le Guin's story (a textual cross-over between stories, a dream, a memory from Pew of reading the book, a coincidence?) .And the Guardian review highlights two more subtle allusions relating to the novel's ending that would otherwise have passed me by.
Indeed this is a novel where I felt 'spoilers' actually enhance the experience - I'd strongly suggest reading the Guardian review, I would even suggest before the book, but certainly afterwards.
The novel is dedicated to Jesse Ball, Lacey's partner, and includes the wonderful acknowledgement Jesse Ball is a mysterious weather pattern that has never been directly observed and can only be measured by its aftermath. It certainly shares similarities with his fable-like yet highly political stories, although she doesn't follow his trademark approach of writing a book in a few days and then not revising it, telling an interviewer:
The first draft took about two months. I read it several months later and found that most of it was bad, so I rewrote it quickly. I repeated this process five or six times between 2016 and 2019, and eventually found that when I had my main character listen to other characters, it made the creation and deletion of dozens of pages much easier. It was as if—oh, I didn’t write that, I just heard someone say it. (from https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...)
indeed Lacey recalled in a recorded conversation between them (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/jes...) that pretty much the first thing she ever said to Ball was “I’ve heard about your methods, and I find them suspicious.”
But if I had one issue with the novel, it is that it did seem to rely on an unfavourable caricature of institutionalised religion, albeit one the author has suggested is rooted in her own upbringing.
Artistically too, as a number of reviewers have noted, it may lean a little too heavily on Le Guin and Shirley Jackson (the overlaps with Ball's novels are more a case of mutual influence). This interview from 2018 was interesting in that regard (https://theadroitjournal.org/2018/09/...) as the Le Guin influence is clearly very deliberate here:
SR: You once described yourself as a “spongy” writer, someone who absorbs and inadvertently mimics the styles of other writers. What writers do you feel spongiest toward? When you notice this foreign voice in your work, do you let it stay, or do you mute that voice in the next draft?
CL: You must learn to use that sponginess as a tool, I feel. If a writer does this to you, you must only read them when you want to use their voice as a direct influence on a particular work. I think I contracted a mental virus from Thomas Bernhard about ten years ago and I still work around the scar tissue. He’s a dangerous one. And my partner has noticed that often when I complain about something it often comes out sounding like a Lydia Davis story. (Representative complaints: You’re often walking a few paces ahead of me; The bird you pointed out flew away before I could see it; We cannot understand why everyone dislikes our friend Margaret.) Davis has completely colonized a part of my brain, and I think she’s brilliant so it’s fine with me.
Overall though a fascinating novel - 4 stars for for amount it made me think although I preferred her debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing. Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
December 23, 2020
I was impressed by this author’s writing in “Nobody is Ever Missing” and gave that novel 4 stars, and will give this novel 4 stars too because again, this woman’s writing, is sometimes just striking. Very clever her use of words, some of those phrases, descriptions of things — I never came across such descriptions, but a number of them resonated with me. Impressive.
I think my rating would have gone down if this book had been any longer than its 204 pages. Because, to me, although I thought the book had a clever structure to it, it would have gotten old and repetitive if it had gone on any longer. The length of the book seemed to be just right.
The structure was that various people in the unnamed town would drop into a chapter and be talking with Pew, a person of indeterminate age and sex and race. I could have said “talk to” because Pew said next to nothing in the book, but s/he did listen and sometimes s/he nodded…I think one time s/he shook somebody’s hand when proffered it to her/him. The rare times s/he talked was typically one word and I think her/his longest utterances were “I can’t remember” and “I was sleeping”.
Total times Pew talked that I counted was 9 times.
You’re not going to get a whole lot from her/him if you want to know the plot from what s/he says. It is her/his memories of things in the past, usually incomplete and difficult for her/him to latch on to, that one gets a disturbing sense that s/he has been violated or abused…almost to the point of catatonia. And w/he makes her/his most utterances to a young man, Nelson, who was orphaned and witnessed his whole family being killed in another country…
This book, near the end, reminded me a lot of ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson. There is an annual Forgiveness Festival that the church members are referring to throughout the book, and from what the reader can gather it does not seem that it’s you ordinary hum-drum run-of-the mill annual church festival. Like something nasty is going to happen. Did I already say that this book reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery? Oh, I did? Then it is time for me to end my review. 🙃
Book reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
• interview with Lacey about the book: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/895192...
• https://southernreviewofbooks.com/202...
I think my rating would have gone down if this book had been any longer than its 204 pages. Because, to me, although I thought the book had a clever structure to it, it would have gotten old and repetitive if it had gone on any longer. The length of the book seemed to be just right.
The structure was that various people in the unnamed town would drop into a chapter and be talking with Pew, a person of indeterminate age and sex and race. I could have said “talk to” because Pew said next to nothing in the book, but s/he did listen and sometimes s/he nodded…I think one time s/he shook somebody’s hand when proffered it to her/him. The rare times s/he talked was typically one word and I think her/his longest utterances were “I can’t remember” and “I was sleeping”.
Total times Pew talked that I counted was 9 times.
You’re not going to get a whole lot from her/him if you want to know the plot from what s/he says. It is her/his memories of things in the past, usually incomplete and difficult for her/him to latch on to, that one gets a disturbing sense that s/he has been violated or abused…almost to the point of catatonia. And w/he makes her/his most utterances to a young man, Nelson, who was orphaned and witnessed his whole family being killed in another country…
This book, near the end, reminded me a lot of ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson. There is an annual Forgiveness Festival that the church members are referring to throughout the book, and from what the reader can gather it does not seem that it’s you ordinary hum-drum run-of-the mill annual church festival. Like something nasty is going to happen. Did I already say that this book reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery? Oh, I did? Then it is time for me to end my review. 🙃
Book reviews:
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
• interview with Lacey about the book: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/895192...
• https://southernreviewofbooks.com/202...
August 16, 2022
Has anyone seen the 1995 movie 'Powder'?
Yeah, I doubt many readers of this have. It was 1995. As a shy 15 year old, I of course waited until it was shown on HBO or Showtime or one of those damned overrated play-the-same-movie-over-and-over movie channels that had about the same type of rotation that a classic rock radio station has. Just like the title character in Pew, no one knows much about this character that's been stuck in a basement most of his life. Other than looking different and being criticized for being timid, there's not much in correlation between the movie and the book that I'm reviewing, but it did make me think of 'Powder' - a movie which hasn't crossed my mind in 25 years.
So many books are derivative, in a sense. You read something and it makes you think of something else. The imagery of Pew was the only thing that made me think of the aforementioned as its premise is somewhat unique.
Imagine gender and race being a blank slate, never coming into context, never being the main focus. Imagine the curiosity of others without the a posteriori prejudice that comes with growing up in a specific time and place. Imagine saying no hateful words, but being hated for what you're not saying.
Pew is society's itch that they cannot scratch, that keeps annoying the hell out of it until they quit trying to solve the problem and create a new problem. Pew is that human sacrifice that changes our learned perceptions and makes us unlearn our biases. That sacrifice could start a revolution or be ignored like many current issues today.
Yeah, I doubt many readers of this have. It was 1995. As a shy 15 year old, I of course waited until it was shown on HBO or Showtime or one of those damned overrated play-the-same-movie-over-and-over movie channels that had about the same type of rotation that a classic rock radio station has. Just like the title character in Pew, no one knows much about this character that's been stuck in a basement most of his life. Other than looking different and being criticized for being timid, there's not much in correlation between the movie and the book that I'm reviewing, but it did make me think of 'Powder' - a movie which hasn't crossed my mind in 25 years.
So many books are derivative, in a sense. You read something and it makes you think of something else. The imagery of Pew was the only thing that made me think of the aforementioned as its premise is somewhat unique.
Imagine gender and race being a blank slate, never coming into context, never being the main focus. Imagine the curiosity of others without the a posteriori prejudice that comes with growing up in a specific time and place. Imagine saying no hateful words, but being hated for what you're not saying.
Pew is society's itch that they cannot scratch, that keeps annoying the hell out of it until they quit trying to solve the problem and create a new problem. Pew is that human sacrifice that changes our learned perceptions and makes us unlearn our biases. That sacrifice could start a revolution or be ignored like many current issues today.
May 16, 2020
I've always been a quiet person. Even when I feel like I'm just as present and chatty as everyone else around me, people have always remarked on how quiet I am. But one of the interesting things this has allowed me to notice is how much people reveal about themselves - not so much in the content of their speech but the way they say things shows a lot about their preoccupations, insecurities, desires and fears. The very quiet narrator at the centre of Catherine Lacey's novel “Pew” is suddenly discovered sleeping in the church of a small American town and because the narrator is found on a pew the locals call this anonymous individual Pew. Even though we the readers are privy to Pew's thoughts we don't know any details about their past or identity. Pew is an adolescent of indeterminate age, indeterminate race and indeterminate gender because their appearance is so ambiguous. No matter how much the town's inhabitants enquire Pew barely ever responds and certainly provides no answers. As the community tries to determine what to do with this mysterious young vagabond, many individuals have private one-sided conversations with Pew where they confess their emotions and unintentionally reveal many of their prejudices. We follow Pew's many encounters over the course of a week leading up to a strange ritualised local ceremony.
This novel's simple premise grants a lot of space to ask teasing sociological and psychological questions about the nature of community and identity. Read my full review of Pew by Catherine Lacey on LonesomeReader
This novel's simple premise grants a lot of space to ask teasing sociological and psychological questions about the nature of community and identity. Read my full review of Pew by Catherine Lacey on LonesomeReader
December 23, 2021
For fans of:
- Flannery O’Connor
- Jordan Peele’s Get Out
- I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
- Ari Aster’s Midsommar
- Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass
But just expect less…resolution. I loved loved loved the reading experience.
It’s creepy, unsettling, thought-provoking, and a slow burn.
I figured it was building to something big, but the ending let me down a tiny bit. Though as I think about it more I think the ending works and is better than something super literal.
Still, I wouldn’t let that discourage people from picking it up. In fact, I want more people to read it so we can talk about it (especially the ending!! What does it mean?!).
- Flannery O’Connor
- Jordan Peele’s Get Out
- I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
- Ari Aster’s Midsommar
- Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass
But just expect less…resolution. I loved loved loved the reading experience.
It’s creepy, unsettling, thought-provoking, and a slow burn.
I figured it was building to something big, but the ending let me down a tiny bit. Though as I think about it more I think the ending works and is better than something super literal.
Still, I wouldn’t let that discourage people from picking it up. In fact, I want more people to read it so we can talk about it (especially the ending!! What does it mean?!).
November 30, 2020
For the first half – I was in love. I adored the prose and thought the structure of the book worked wonderfully to invoke a sense of mounting dread. Catherine Lacey constructs a story that feels more like an extended fable than like a novel – in the best possible way. The story begins when a person is found sleeping in a church’s pew. The people in this small town take them in but as the person is not speaking (and nobody seems to be able to agree what they look like, how old they, what gender they are), it does not take very long for the others to turn on them. The book is infused with a growing sense of dread, as Pew (as they are called by the people who took them in) meets different people who all start telling them their darkest secrets, filling the silence the only way they know how. In the background are preparations for an ominous festival, the purpose of which remains cloaked in secrecy for Pew.
The first few chapters really worked for me, I thought the introductions of the different people and their backstories were intriguing, the prose was incredible, and Pew a sympathetic main character that I could not help but deeply root for. I also appreciated how the people were more archetypes than proper characters (unlike Pew who feels real if vague). I thought this worked really well for the fable-like mood. As this pattern kept repeating (Pew is sent to some person, that person assumes to have knowledge of Pew and then starts telling Pew their story), the sense of dread kept ratchetting up. However, as soon as Lacey started showing her hands and actually filling in the blanks a bit, the story lost its appeal to me.
Additionally, I thought the commentary on gender worked a lot better and was smoother integrated than the commentary on race where the fable-like prose felt ill-fitted. I think, ultimately, the prose was not quite strong enough for me to distract from the problems I had with the book. But when it worked for me, it worked so brilliantly that I am very glad to have read this.
Content warnings: Racism, description of lynchings, police corruption, religious fundamentalism, trans racial adoption
I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
The first few chapters really worked for me, I thought the introductions of the different people and their backstories were intriguing, the prose was incredible, and Pew a sympathetic main character that I could not help but deeply root for. I also appreciated how the people were more archetypes than proper characters (unlike Pew who feels real if vague). I thought this worked really well for the fable-like mood. As this pattern kept repeating (Pew is sent to some person, that person assumes to have knowledge of Pew and then starts telling Pew their story), the sense of dread kept ratchetting up. However, as soon as Lacey started showing her hands and actually filling in the blanks a bit, the story lost its appeal to me.
Additionally, I thought the commentary on gender worked a lot better and was smoother integrated than the commentary on race where the fable-like prose felt ill-fitted. I think, ultimately, the prose was not quite strong enough for me to distract from the problems I had with the book. But when it worked for me, it worked so brilliantly that I am very glad to have read this.
Content warnings: Racism, description of lynchings, police corruption, religious fundamentalism, trans racial adoption
I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
May 14, 2020
The premise of Catherine Lacey's third novel is simple and interesting. In a small town, in an uncertain time period, a homeless drifter wanders into a church and spends the night there. The next morning, they're discovered beneath the pew by a family of churchgoers. It's difficult for anyone to figure out anything about this person: they do not speak, and their gender, race and even age are indeterminate. They're given the nickname 'Pew', and the community takes on the task of caring for them, shuffling them from household to household. Pew's silence often encourages people to tell their stories, and Pew listens. But in time, their refusal to reveal anything about themself – their seeming inability to do so – provokes the ire of the townspeople. Acceptance turns to resentment.
I hadn't expected that the book would be narrated by the character of Pew – I wouldn't have thought such a thing could work, since we have to accept that they know so little about their own identity. In fact, the uncertainty is beautifully managed, and the disconnect between body and being – Pew's, but also people's in general – becomes a central principle of the novel.
Through snatches of overheard news reports, we become aware of a spate of disappearances across the United States. Is Pew one of 'the missing'? There are also ominous references to a festival that takes place in the town, an event, one woman says, that 'outsiders don't always understand'. There's something strange at work here, it seems – something a little outside reality. The result is tension, a tension that mounts throughout the book; I feared for Pew, though I didn't know why.
I loved Lacey's last book, The Answers, and I was intrigued by this one: I thought it sounded a little like Tiffany McDaniel's The Summer That Melted Everything, in which a boy who claims to be the Devil appears in a small Ohio town and becomes an avatar for the locals' fears. I wasn't entirely wrong about this; there is a similar Southern Gothic vibe to Pew. But the style is something different altogether. Lacey's writing here is clean and precise, and she leans into the Shirley Jackson parallels already suggested by the plot.
The story reaches its crescendo on the day of the 'Forgiveness Festival'. The ending is both anticlimactic and revelatory – not what I expected, yet absolutely perfect for the book. Pew is a brief, effective, haunting fable. It's a little unsettling and somehow also comforting. It confirms Lacey as a fascinating and unpredictable novelist.
I received an advance review copy of Pew from the publisher through Edelweiss.
TinyLetter
I hadn't expected that the book would be narrated by the character of Pew – I wouldn't have thought such a thing could work, since we have to accept that they know so little about their own identity. In fact, the uncertainty is beautifully managed, and the disconnect between body and being – Pew's, but also people's in general – becomes a central principle of the novel.
I took off my clothes... I looked over at the water, then down at this body. Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?
Through snatches of overheard news reports, we become aware of a spate of disappearances across the United States. Is Pew one of 'the missing'? There are also ominous references to a festival that takes place in the town, an event, one woman says, that 'outsiders don't always understand'. There's something strange at work here, it seems – something a little outside reality. The result is tension, a tension that mounts throughout the book; I feared for Pew, though I didn't know why.
I loved Lacey's last book, The Answers, and I was intrigued by this one: I thought it sounded a little like Tiffany McDaniel's The Summer That Melted Everything, in which a boy who claims to be the Devil appears in a small Ohio town and becomes an avatar for the locals' fears. I wasn't entirely wrong about this; there is a similar Southern Gothic vibe to Pew. But the style is something different altogether. Lacey's writing here is clean and precise, and she leans into the Shirley Jackson parallels already suggested by the plot.
The story reaches its crescendo on the day of the 'Forgiveness Festival'. The ending is both anticlimactic and revelatory – not what I expected, yet absolutely perfect for the book. Pew is a brief, effective, haunting fable. It's a little unsettling and somehow also comforting. It confirms Lacey as a fascinating and unpredictable novelist.
I received an advance review copy of Pew from the publisher through Edelweiss.
TinyLetter
March 28, 2021
In a small southern town, an unidentified person is found in a church. He/she offers no information on their background and does not speak. They are nicknamed Pew by the town’s residents.
Pew stays with one family as the residents work together to try to find out more and determine how to best help him/her. Pew meets several different people — adults and children, some more welcoming than others. The town is anxiously planning for its festival at the end of the week and emotions become heightened as the day approaches.
Pew is fairly short and while I didn’t like all of the characters, I appreciated the authentic human elements included. It’s a strange book, in a good way, and a thought-provoking story.
Pew stays with one family as the residents work together to try to find out more and determine how to best help him/her. Pew meets several different people — adults and children, some more welcoming than others. The town is anxiously planning for its festival at the end of the week and emotions become heightened as the day approaches.
Pew is fairly short and while I didn’t like all of the characters, I appreciated the authentic human elements included. It’s a strange book, in a good way, and a thought-provoking story.
August 1, 2020
Lacey’s third novel is a mysterious fable about a stranger showing up in a Southern town in the week before an annual ritual. Pew’s narrator, homeless, mute and amnesiac, wakes up one Sunday in the middle of a church service, observing everything like an alien anthropologist. The stranger’s gender, race, and age are entirely unclear, so the Reverend suggests the name “Pew”. The drama over deciphering Pew’s identity plays out against the preparations for the enigmatic Forgiveness Festival and increasing unrest over racially motivated disappearances. Troubling but strangely compelling; recommended to fans of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor.
See my full review at BookBrowse. (See also my related article on the history of church pews.)
See my full review at BookBrowse. (See also my related article on the history of church pews.)
April 10, 2024
I found this book while researching comps for The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Something about the synopsis stood out to me like a neon sign:
"Racially ambiguous, genderless, mute, and of unknown age, Pew is named by where they were found -- sleeping in a church. Pew's muteness allows the townspeople to project whatever they wish; Pew's thoughts are communicated to readers alone. But fear of the unknown is strong, and soon the town's generosity turns to suspicion and mistrust."
But also, there was something about the town's ceremonial, Forgiveness Festival.
I found it when I went book shopping shortly after discovering it--a sign! I bought it, started reading it that afternoon and night--, and finished in the morning. It's one of the most important books I've ever read, honestly. I'll never, ever forget it and I'll never stop recommending it. I almost highlighted something that spoke to me on every page and I want to share a few.
"It seems people have a lot of reasons for entering a church and perhaps even more reasons for leaving one..."
"Perhaps an honest feeling will always find a way to force its way through, an objector crying out in a crowd, hoping someone will hear."
"You're right not to say anything. They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they use it against you."
"People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others...to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reigns for cruelty..."
"Racially ambiguous, genderless, mute, and of unknown age, Pew is named by where they were found -- sleeping in a church. Pew's muteness allows the townspeople to project whatever they wish; Pew's thoughts are communicated to readers alone. But fear of the unknown is strong, and soon the town's generosity turns to suspicion and mistrust."
But also, there was something about the town's ceremonial, Forgiveness Festival.
I found it when I went book shopping shortly after discovering it--a sign! I bought it, started reading it that afternoon and night--, and finished in the morning. It's one of the most important books I've ever read, honestly. I'll never, ever forget it and I'll never stop recommending it. I almost highlighted something that spoke to me on every page and I want to share a few.
"It seems people have a lot of reasons for entering a church and perhaps even more reasons for leaving one..."
"Perhaps an honest feeling will always find a way to force its way through, an objector crying out in a crowd, hoping someone will hear."
"You're right not to say anything. They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they use it against you."
"People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others...to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reigns for cruelty..."
January 25, 2021
Throughout this work, the titular character chooses not to speak, for the most part, and I agree with that decision: what is there to say to what’s said to them. Silence is inimical to many people and the people of the town, not surprisingly, fill the void with their worries, their hopes, their prejudices, and their own stories. In having a main character not speak, there’s the danger of making that character flat, but Pew’s thoughts are rich and worthy of contemplation.
I didn’t fully appreciate this novel until, at Cecily’s recommendation, I read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which I did immediately after finishing Pew. (The story’s only four pages long and can be found online.) Not only is the name of the neighboring county of the novel an anagram of Omelas, the story’s concluding paragraph is used as an epigraph for Pew. The novel holds at least three references (one, a direct quote spoken by a minor character) taken straight from the story. I now understand Pew’s thoughts about and connection to the “fields” (as in grass), something I’d found perplexing.
I then wondered if the novel stands on its own without one knowing the Le Guin story, but that’s a different debate, I suppose. Any lack of previous comprehension is my own failing and perhaps you’ll understand it better than I did without reading the Le Guin afterward. It was rewarding to do so, though, and bumped my satisfaction up a star. Now that I have that fuller understanding, I won’t explain it here: it’s best you come to it on your own. Thank you, Cecily. And thank you to my dear friend Cathrine, who gifted me this: I likely wouldn't have read it otherwise.
I didn’t fully appreciate this novel until, at Cecily’s recommendation, I read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which I did immediately after finishing Pew. (The story’s only four pages long and can be found online.) Not only is the name of the neighboring county of the novel an anagram of Omelas, the story’s concluding paragraph is used as an epigraph for Pew. The novel holds at least three references (one, a direct quote spoken by a minor character) taken straight from the story. I now understand Pew’s thoughts about and connection to the “fields” (as in grass), something I’d found perplexing.
I then wondered if the novel stands on its own without one knowing the Le Guin story, but that’s a different debate, I suppose. Any lack of previous comprehension is my own failing and perhaps you’ll understand it better than I did without reading the Le Guin afterward. It was rewarding to do so, though, and bumped my satisfaction up a star. Now that I have that fuller understanding, I won’t explain it here: it’s best you come to it on your own. Thank you, Cecily. And thank you to my dear friend Cathrine, who gifted me this: I likely wouldn't have read it otherwise.
May 17, 2021
I like the intention behind this book very much, but the execution felt as bland and monotonal as the cover. The idea of Pew as a nearly silent enigma driving the narrative was great, but Pew as a character struck me as dull rather than mysterious. The rest of the characters had the kind of one dimensionality that works in a satire, but this book doesn’t have the bite or wit of satire – sometimes it struck me as almost stubbornly humorless. If it was shorter, I suppose it might be a parable. The atmosphere turned a little Twilight Zone-y, but without any tension to sustain it. I think this book may have been more effective as a graphic novel, although I don’t think I’d have liked it any better. I’ve given it a second star because it reads so quickly and smoothly.
January 9, 2021
I really liked the idea of a protagonist who you can't really figure out anything about, but what you see is peoples reaction to that person. Very beautiful and unexpected. Original and the writing was simple but effective. And the tension is there through the whole book.
June 23, 2021
’...if you ever need to sleep, if you are ever so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones, and you’re walking along a dark road with no one...and all you know is the desire to sleep, and all you have is no place to sleep, one thing you can do is look for a church.’
These are the thoughts of the person who will later be called Pew, a person who will be discovered sleeping in the pew of a church in this small southern town by a family entering the church one Sunday. They are unsure of who this person is, not simply because they are a stranger, but it seems impossible to identify them as male or female, or to determine their age, and all their questions are met with silence.
’A person draped in heavy cloth stood at the front of the church and said things in such a way to make those words seem obvious and true, how simple the world was...how everything was here, all the answers were here and we could all just accept them, roll over and accept them like a sleep body accepts air.’
No one seems to consider the possibility that or to wonder if this person is physically incapable of speaking, or if they don’t understand the questions being asked, or if they simply are refusing to reply. Still, this family, Hilda and Steven the parents, with their three children offer them a place to stay ’for as long as it takes.’
The questions persist despite the lack of any response. What are you? Black or white? Male or female? Anger, impatience follows from those asking, as their frustrations grow with no response to their 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?’
As Pew is introduced to more people, and as more people recognize, if not understand, Pew’s lack of responses, some begin to confide in them, knowing, believing their secrets are safe with Pew.
’I listened but I did not listen.’
’I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight.’
’Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.’
A story of life, a life living outside the ‘norm’ we prescribe for all, a story of self-acceptance and recognizing and embracing one’s true self, as well as a story of those who expect others to neatly fit inside so we can attach the ‘right’ label to them. There’s an element of this that feels elusive (or maybe that’s just me), almost daring us to not only understand the meaning or moral of this story, but to embrace it. There’s also a slightly almost playfully-cheeky element to this, as well, which exposes the hidden darker side of man, insisting on others conforming to our, rather than just accepting people as they are - people, along with a nod to this acknowledging this life, this gift we were given, and living it fully.
This is a novel that you really have to experience for yourself, one that will leave you both thinking about and feeling about life, and our responsibilities in this gift we’ve been given.
’Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?’
Many thanks to the Public Library system, and the many Librarians that manage, organize and keep it running, for the loan of this book!
September 18, 2020
On the surface, this book reminded me of growing up watching the eerie Twilight Zone on television, where things happen but you never know quite where things are headed, and the segments often ended without complete resolution. Despite the other-worldly feel, allegory seems to be the best description of this read.
The story follows a being that defies description or categorization. Appearing suddenly in their midst, "Pew" (so named for waking in a church on a bench) baffles the townsfolk who can't tell gender or age or race with any agreement or certainty. We see through Pew's eyes as those around her try to deal with this conundrum. We see how uncomfortable people become when they can't put you into categories, when you don't act as they think you "should", when they can't "know" you in the way they think they need to. We see how people begin to project their own needs and issues onto Pew, in response to the blank slate she presents to them, without speaking. We see how they make up their own realities, to fit their own narratives.
Beneath the surface, this story appears to expose and indict how even well-meaning beliefs can injure others, how we often fail to live up to our own beliefs and standards in actual practice, how we layer over and hide from our baser instincts and failings, how "knowing" others is a slippery and evasive slope.
While the story held my interest, at times it seemed a bit too elusive and the character of Pew was not consistent in presentation. Pew disappeared into the shadows as the monologues of others took center stage, in ways that didn't seem cohesive to the overall story.
A decent read, a little eerie, and some interesting social constructs present, but perhaps a little too abstract for my head right now. I've seen others say that there is even more embedded in the story if one is familiar with the other literary and social references present. I'm too brain fried to go after them right now.
The story follows a being that defies description or categorization. Appearing suddenly in their midst, "Pew" (so named for waking in a church on a bench) baffles the townsfolk who can't tell gender or age or race with any agreement or certainty. We see through Pew's eyes as those around her try to deal with this conundrum. We see how uncomfortable people become when they can't put you into categories, when you don't act as they think you "should", when they can't "know" you in the way they think they need to. We see how people begin to project their own needs and issues onto Pew, in response to the blank slate she presents to them, without speaking. We see how they make up their own realities, to fit their own narratives.
Beneath the surface, this story appears to expose and indict how even well-meaning beliefs can injure others, how we often fail to live up to our own beliefs and standards in actual practice, how we layer over and hide from our baser instincts and failings, how "knowing" others is a slippery and evasive slope.
While the story held my interest, at times it seemed a bit too elusive and the character of Pew was not consistent in presentation. Pew disappeared into the shadows as the monologues of others took center stage, in ways that didn't seem cohesive to the overall story.
A decent read, a little eerie, and some interesting social constructs present, but perhaps a little too abstract for my head right now. I've seen others say that there is even more embedded in the story if one is familiar with the other literary and social references present. I'm too brain fried to go after them right now.
August 29, 2023
A gorgeous Southern Gothic on the revealing nature of silence.
On the eve of their mysterious "Forgiveness Festival", a small town is rocked by the discovery of a stranger sleeping in their church. The stranger is of uncertain age, race, and sex. The stranger also does not speak.
They can, they just choose not to.
Having been found in their church, the townspeople call the stranger "Pew".
At first, they are accommodating. One family takes Pew in, setting them up a room and doctor's appointments. They offer them clothes, either male or female, all the while trying to get Pew to talk.
In Pew's silence, in Pew's refusal to conform and refusal to obey, the town's truer faces are revealed. They say things to Pew's silence that might've been better left unsaid - admissions of guilt, of suspicion, of doubt, of fear, of hatred. They speak of their secret dreams and ambitions, of the private things told to them not meant to be repeated.
And these revelations balk against the town's culture of secrets.
Of obscurity.
Of repentance.
Pew is an utterly breathtaking, but uneasy book. It says many things, especially in the quiet feelings it instills in the reader.
On the eve of their mysterious "Forgiveness Festival", a small town is rocked by the discovery of a stranger sleeping in their church. The stranger is of uncertain age, race, and sex. The stranger also does not speak.
They can, they just choose not to.
Having been found in their church, the townspeople call the stranger "Pew".
At first, they are accommodating. One family takes Pew in, setting them up a room and doctor's appointments. They offer them clothes, either male or female, all the while trying to get Pew to talk.
In Pew's silence, in Pew's refusal to conform and refusal to obey, the town's truer faces are revealed. They say things to Pew's silence that might've been better left unsaid - admissions of guilt, of suspicion, of doubt, of fear, of hatred. They speak of their secret dreams and ambitions, of the private things told to them not meant to be repeated.
And these revelations balk against the town's culture of secrets.
Of obscurity.
Of repentance.
Pew is an utterly breathtaking, but uneasy book. It says many things, especially in the quiet feelings it instills in the reader.
July 3, 2020
As others have pointed out, there is a lot to chew on in these few pages. Although Catherine Lacey employs the first person, we really don't learn very much more about the enigmatic Pew than the curious church members who take them in. Reactions by these townfolk don't vary much -- when in Pew's company they tend to feel compelled to spew their secrets and fears. It is a well known fact that a stranger is the most receptive of confessors, and the ageless, genderless, impossible to quantify Pew is the perfect receptacle who mainly seems to have an affinity with nature more than with human beings. Imbued with some lovely language, this is a gem.
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