Our latest bookclub pick was Pew by Catherine Lacey. This was the X out of 4 books that she has written. Both Pew and her newest novel Biography of X being books I’ve wanted to read for a while. After feeling a bit uninspired by American fiction as of late I really loved what Lacey did with this novel. There has been a rise in unnamed protagonists but I’ve never read anything that has used a nameless, genderless, raceless person to tell the story through. For a short novel it really raised a lot of questions, it is definitely a book that you finish and continue to think about. The novel is very compact, just being 224 pages I thought I would fly through reading it possibly in one sitting or two. But the intensity meant I read it in bitesize chunks instead. I was fascinated how much Lacey managed to convey in this short book.
Although I would say I think I would have liked it to have been longer and to have gone into much more depth, I would love to have discovered more about Pew, more about the town and the aftermath of the festival. To be perfectly honest I’m not sure that I fully understood the book, once I finished I went back and reread the last few pages, then I followed up reading other peoples reviews. I know I’m not alone in this feeling and I think that it is intentional from Lacey, to create an ending that is open enough for the reader to make their own interpretation. Because after all isn’t that the essence of Pew.
Set in small town South America Pew is found at Sunday service sleeping on a church pew, with no name, no voice and no memories the townspeople take it upon themselves to give this young person a place to sleep, clean clothes to wear. Pew is constantly reminded that these people are there to help, happy to house them. But we soon learn that the goodwill comes with strings. The first being wanting or as they put it needing to know Pew’s gender, age and race they find this unnerving, multiple occasions implying it isn’t safe for Pew to be around other kids if they don’t know Pew’s gender themselves. The townspeople cannot agree to what gender Pew is, what age they might be and what to do.
I found this need to know so interesting, I asked myself whether I would be able to describe myself without using gender, race, age, nationality or even my job. We live in a society of social media where we probably know too much about people we don’t know, people we will never meet. For some this has sparked the sense of entitlement feeling that they are entitled to know, to have a say and an opinion on this.
Personally I was routing for Pew to stay silent. As a chatty person and at times an oversharer I loved reading a character who barely speaks. I thought that their silence which made them almost the confessor to the townspeople they met a really interesting way to convey a story. Although personally felt that this could have maybe structured more of a narrative or together the confessions could have linked a little together a little more. It could have been an opportunity to open the readers eyes to the forgiveness festival. But I think Lacey not doing this was entirely intentional. Although I would have loved to have learnt more about them and maybe have had a backstory given to the reader I think the ambiguity and having to accept not knowing Pew’s history was a clever move from Lacey.
There were plenty parts of the book that I think I missed the point, or didn’t fully understand what was being implied. Since reading other reviews on this novel they stated the importance of the reference of Ursula K Le Guin’s Fable The ones who walk away from Omela’s which the moral of the story is there can be no happiness without suffering. I think this would have been interesting to have read before reading Pew or at least been familiar with.
All in all I thought it was a good read, I enjoyed reading something that seemed different to the norm as well as reading something that felt challenging in both grasping concept but challenging society and the way we think about and interact with people in day to day life. I would however loved for it to be a little less conceptual and wrap up a few ends, like learning Pew’s back story, the aftermath of the festival, the stories that Pew is told some I felt just wanted to know what the point of them were. Especially the story of Mrs Columbus and her son…. Alas we move!
If you read along let me know your thoughts on the book!