Pew: A Novel
WINNER of the 2021 NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Finalist for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's Best Fiction Books of 2020. One of Amazon's 100 Best Books of 2020.
“The people of this community are stifling, and generous, cruel, earnest, needy, overconfident, fragile and repressive, which is to say that they are brilliantly rendered by their wise maker, Catherine Lacey.” --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
A figure with no discernible identity appears in a small, religious town, throwing its inhabitants into a frenzy
In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew.
As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations. Pew listens and observes while experiencing brief flashes of past lives or clues about their origin. As days pass, the void around Pew’s presence begins to unnerve the community, whose generosity erodes into menace and suspicion. Yet by the time Pew’s story reaches a shattering and unsettling climax at the Forgiveness Festival, the secret of who they really are—a devil or an angel or something else entirely—is dwarfed by even larger truths.
Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third novel, is a foreboding, provocative, and amorphous fable about the world today: its contradictions, its flimsy morality, and the limits of judging others based on their appearance. With precision and restraint, one of our most beloved and boundary-pushing writers holds up a mirror to her characters’ true selves, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the faulty tools society uses to categorize human complexity.
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Community Reviews
My friend Evie picked this book for us to read together and when I read the premise - I was all in. PEW is a story told about a figure that was discovered one Sunday morning when the Bonner family filed into their usual pew in church. The father decided they would just sit quietly, wait for the person to wake up and then go from there. In a series of odd events, the Bonner family take the individual to lunch, then ultimately to their home and gives them a place to stay while the family determines who this person is.
If you prefer video format reviews, I do have a non spoiler dedicated review for this one over on my channel, The Nerdy Narrative, which can be found here: https://youtu.be/LlRCEcmQbII
The religious community works itself up over the identity of this figure who refuses to speak - it's no surprise that the first two things they want to know is what race this person is and their gender. I thought it was interesting how each person saw "Pew" and described them in many different ways, according to how they interpreted their race and color. Because the figure wouldn't speak, the reverend dubbed the person as "Pew".
The community begins to pass Pew around from house to house and when Pew still doesn't speak, the different members of the congregation begin to use Pew as a sort of sounding board, confessing secrets and the sort. As the days go by, the congregation turns from being understanding and being the "Saviors" of Pew to being suspicious, not wanting them around their children and such.
I loved that the story was given to us from the perspective of Pew. It was written so ambiguously that even the reader is unable to determine the age, race or sex of Pew - but you learn that's not what is important - or at least I did. It was the flashes of remembrances Pew had - flashbacks, experiences that I found so interesting. Pew's perception of the congregation as they were passed from home to home, the way they listen, observe and mull over what they've been told...and what they picked up from reading between the lines.
I am very glad Evie recommended this one to me and I look forward to looking into Catherine Lacey's other two novels in the coming months!
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