Pew

A Novel

by Catherine Lacey

hardcover, 224 pages

Published July 21, 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-23092-0
OCLC Number:: 1119749884

(8 reviews)

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 …

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.

5 editions

Erin reviewed Pew: A Novel by Catherine Lacey

Review of 'Pew' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I didn't go with 5 stars for this one even though I really liked it. I normally give 5 stars to books that hit me harder than this one did, but I still really liked it.

100% understand why some readers would not like this one. This is very much a literary work, even a philosophical work. I think familiarity with the Le Guin short story helps as well. The narrative is more about the themes explored - though I would say it's not fully giving up character for that. It does basically give up plot for it, though.

Themes of community, difference (and how humans handle it), the need to categorize and the discomfort with ambiguity and the unknown. Throughout the story different people get confessional with Pew because Pew is mostly silent and blank. Pew is more responsive to the people they can see are not out to "save" them. I think it'd be easy to read this book and wonder things like, why on earth am I reading about peacocks?? But I put on my English major hat and could see the thematic connections running through the whole book. In the peacock example, Lacey explores this instinct to attack the things that are different from us.

The style is minimalist in terms of emotional communication to the reader. You aren't generally told how people feel nor is it made clear to you how to feel about what's happening. The book trusts you to react without prompting. There were some details of body language that I felt communicated a lot of what wasn't said. Eye contact or lack of it with Pew is regularly described, revealing different characters' discomfort with Pew.

I thought Lacey skillfully, quietly (and with subtlety) explored some big themes. Exposed some self-deception and some of our worst tribalist tendencies.