Pew, by Catherine Lacey Sam Leith
SAM LEITH Pew
The narrator of Pew doesn’t talk much. Barely at all, in fact: I don’t think they speak more than 20 words aloud in the whole novel. And I say ‘they’ advisedly – it’s unclear whether this narrator is male or female. Their age is indeterminate – somewhere between childhood and adolescence. Some think they might be black, some white. Do they have family? A past? They don’t seem to know the answers to these questions themselves.
We know, at the outset, that they wander from place to place somewhere in Bible-belty small-town America, and like to sneak into churches to sleep. In one, they wake up during a service; they are then taken home by a kindly-seeming, God-fearing family who call them Pew because that’s where they were discovered. The action of the novel, such as it is, takes place over the week that follows.
Pew’s silence disturbs almost everyone he/she comes into contact with. We seem to be in the territory of allegory, parable or something like it.
The assumption is made that Pew has suffered a trauma, and everyone seems – out of kindness or curiosity or unease – to want to get to the bottom of it. In practice, he/she is passed from person to person and catalyses a series of monologues about the interlocutor’s own feelings or memories. Yet Pew is ill at ease.
‘I felt all the televisions were watching me,’ he/she says. He/she has a disconnected memory of seeing a peacock spread its tail: ‘Each feather seemed to be watching me for a moment.’ Later: ‘I watched the crowd that seemed to watch me.’ Pew is inspecting the world, aware of being inspected in turn, resistant to being inspected, suspicious of the motives of others yet seemingly at a loss to do anything but follow along with their wishes.
As a narrator, Pew is perceptive but affectless in tone – he/she doesn’t seem to want anything, except to be left alone, and emotion is often divined by inference. When a medical examination is proposed, Pew is asked to take off their clothes: ‘My face must have said something I couldn’t hide; she told me there was no reason to be afraid, that it wouldn’t hurt, that it would only take a few minutes.’ Pew silently refuses. Her would-be helpers, in their nicey-nicey, God-fearing way, get just a little bit more pinched and tense.
Meanwhile, there’s a gathering sense of unease. The son of the family is resentful at being displaced from his bedroom to make way for Pew. The community is uneasy with strangers. The family take to locking Pew into the room. Something sinister is happening to children in a nearby town. And it becomes clear that the town is preparing for ‘the Festival’. A slight Wicker Man or Rosemary’s Baby vibe seems to drift into the story – but, like much else, it never becomes much more than a vibe.
I adored Catherine Lacey’s short stories, but I confess I struggled with this novel. It’s solemnly portentous where the stories are humorously self-aware, and the elliptical style – along with Pew’s extreme passivity – asks the reader to forgo many of the usual pleasures of narrative. Lacey’s themes, here, are huge ones – shame and guilt, identity, human connectedness, the terrors and consolations of community, what it means to live in a sexed and racialised body and how we communicate or don’t. You can’t fault the ambition or the seriousness.
But it’s wispy, and a little one-note: every conversation is freighted with significance. Every anecdote or encounter seems to bear on the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life, and the mysteriousness of the human condition.
Pew’s narration – and the words of her various interlocutors – abound with unmoored sententiae, rhetorical questions and near-aphorisms. ‘Maybe we were all looking for one another without knowing it.’ ‘How was it that living always feels so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?’ ‘What a terror a body lives through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.’
But for this reader, at least, Lacey would have addressed them more effectively with a story more securely pegged to the ground.