PositiveThe Cardiff ReviewCatherine Lacey’s new novel, Pew , begins with the body and its needs. Pew is narrated by a person who, motivated by intense tiredness—\'so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones\'—goes to sleep in a church pew, and wakes up to a family questioning them on a Sunday morning. This person, whom the family decides to name \'Pew,\' possesses a body without an easily identifiable gender or race—\'What are you? I was sometimes asked\'—and little if any memory of their past ... Pew’s desire to separate from the body drives the novel. And though this desire abounds, as Lacey points out, in historical precedent—Descartes, Plato, the Gnostics—it can nonetheless feel, in our soulless, ruthlessly corporeal times, utterly heretical. Pew rarely talks, but they rarely think either, or at least the reader isn’t privy to most of their thoughts ... With so little of the story taken up by reflection, Pew, and by extension Lacey, has ample space to unfurl a considerable flair for physical description ... Pew presents a perplexing knot of contradictory impulses, both yearnings for the spiritual and connections to the physical, that precisely adumbrates the position of someone who wants to go to a church that doesn’t exist.
