Pew
A Novel
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3.4 • 38 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Catherine Lacey’s third novel is a marvelously taut parable in the tradition of Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery.” When devout members of a Southern congregation discover a young person of indeterminate gender and ethnicity sleeping in their church, concern for this mute stranger, whom they call Pew, quickly mutates into an unsettling obsession with uncovering their true identity. Each chapter spans a day in the week leading up to a mysterious festival. As various townspeople respond to Pew’s silence with troubling confessions, Lacey explores entrenched ideas about race and religion. With its crisp prose and masterful pacing, Pew exerts a gravitational pull that kept us rooted in the novel’s ominous world from start to finish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lacey (Certain American States) sets an ambitious, powerful fable of identity and belief in the contemporary American South. An unnamed person with no sense of gender or race ("Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I've been told. I look at my skin and cannot say what shade it is") is found sleeping in a church pew by Steven, Hilda, and their three boys. The family decide to house the mute stranger, whom they name Pew. The action, which takes place over one week, mostly consists of Pew's interactions with the town's residents, who offer one-sided monologues to Pew about their Christian beliefs and believe Pew is their "new jesus." Pew's indeterminate features and the townspeople's habit of projecting onto Pew lead them to see what they want to see, and here Lacey showcases a keen ear for the lilting, sometimes bombastic music of human speech that reveals more than her speakers intend. Pew, meanwhile, bonds with Nelson, a teenage refugee from a war-torn country whose intelligence his caretakers underestimate. Lacey's incisive look at the townspeople's narrow understanding draws a stark contrast with Pew's mute wishes, imagining a life in which "our bodies wouldn't determine our lives, or the lives of others." The action builds toward a mysterious Forgiveness Festival and a memorable climax with disturbing echoes of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" unveiled in a harrowing crescendo of call and response. Lacey's talent shines in this masterful work, her best yet.
