Lacey works at the provocative end of contemporary American fiction, and Pew is her sharpest novel yet: a tale of the quiet savagery of 'good' intentions, and the tyranny—and ecstasy—of belonging ... How easily, this novel shows, the language of forgiveness can become 'a costume for forgetting' ... Lacey’s ferocious rebuke of church-sponsored sanctimony could easily slip into parochial caricature and contempt—fighting one form of self-righteousness with another—were it not for her silent protagonist, whose private, humane thoughts are our only guide to a world of long-held secrets ... And while there may be allegories lurking here, the author offers no tidy moral to her anti-fable.
... prepare to face a utilitarian dilemma, embrace its discomfort, and respond to its challenge ... Though ostensibly a realist writer, her style ushers the reader into that delightfully uncanny space between fantasy and reality. The fable-like milieu that Pew inhabits creeps closer to surrealism than any of her previous works, and it does so while remaining in a very real—or at least recognizable—world. Her characters are built with greater nuance and charity than they are in her previous novels ... The most impressive feat Lacey has accomplished in her newest novel is the ambitious construction of the narrator: an unidentifiable stranger, apparently mute, lacking any clear markers of sex, race, age, or background. Some readers may find it difficult to buy into the narrator’s ambiguous identity ... But that difficulty is also a crucial element to what Lacey so magnificently accomplishes in this novel: a work that evokes the same presumptions and privileges in the reader as it does in its characters—particularly those of the townsfolk ... For anyone who values literature that tests commonly held standards regarding what a character should be and how they are developed, this is a book not to be missed. Its success at pushing beyond preconceived ideas about a character’s identity and narratorial credence will be discussed among writers for years to come.
... a timely entry into the conversation this country’s been having for years about 'otherness.' ... Who are these people? You’ve seen them before, which forecloses on opportunities the novel might have taken to explore a more nuanced version of, for instance, your standard missionary who patronizes the savages in the name of saving them. Still, it’s interesting to see all this from the 'savage’s' point of view.
In no way a ‘tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’, Pew is instead a kind of reverie, a wide-eyed spin on the Southern novel. There are vestiges of the tradition still to be seen—the sinister prejudice of the region, the ignorance, the fear—and Lacey cites earlier fiction by Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor as an influence in the acknowledgments. But we’re also somewhere entirely different—in a murky, unknowing dream. The novel proceeds briskly, with elaborate but well-turned sentences that flow together and rarely fail to hold attention. It’s possible to find some repetition, to grow impatient with the mystery, and perhaps to wonder whether this tale might have made its mark as a longish short story equally well. But surely it’s an unusual departure from the mainstream, almost enough so as to not figure into the Southern genre at all, and as such noteworthy[.]
... strange, estranging and heavy-handed ... This is a novel that takes itself very seriously. The reader who has kept pace with Lacey’s fiction will be willing, mostly, to take it seriously, too ... What works in this novel is its Kafkaesque sense, through Pew, of free-floating anxiety and mortification of a sort that is impossible to define and thus impossible to soothe. Pew will not be characterized, interpreted, diagnosed or annotated. She seems to drift, like the planchette on a Ouija board ... Pew’s muteness draws out other people’s stories, in the manner of the fiction of Rachel Cusk, among others. Some of these are confessional and quite dark, yet few resonate ... Lacey has a mastery of the lives and lingo of the Have a Nice Day crowd, the kind of people whose defensive optimism keeps them from learning about anyone. She stacks the deck so heavily against these hair-sprayed grotesques that they’re brittle, however; they crack like dry spaghetti ... This novel walks a high wire between pretentiousness and a kind of cool, disembodied unease. For me, it fell too often into the goo pit ... Pew feels as if Pew is lying perpetually in a canoe, able only to see the sky above. The reader may feel stuck looking in the other direction, as if his or her face has been inserted into the equivalent of one of those holes at the ends of massage tables, where all one can see is floor tile and dust mites ... Lacey is such a talented writer that she casts a certain spell, even when that spell is distant and difficult to tune in.
... muted and opaque, the prose spare and clean, the story told with the disaffected eye of a documentarian. For those with their finger on the pulse of contemporary fiction, it’s like anticipating a book by Ali Smith only to discover it’s been written by Rachel Cusk. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I love Smith and Cusk – but I was caught off guard by how different in tone and structure Pew is to The Answers. Once the shape of the story became clearer, and once I realised that Lacey, just like all of us, is grappling with the conflicts and contradictions of the current moment, I found myself in tune with this strange, arresting novel ... The uncertainty around Pew’s identity and origins – are they an angel, or a teenager fleeing abuse, or something far stranger? – gives the novel an allegorical flavour. It’s an allegory, though, that actively avoids teaching the reader a moral lesson. Rather, Lacey asks us to question our urge to categorise and label, to force or project an identity on those around us. On that note, what I found so confronting is that, just like the townspeople I was moderately frustrated at the ambiguity regarding Pew’s identity. More disturbing is that, while I was furious on Pew’s behalf when a nurse, and then a doctor, almost force them to undress to reveal their genitalia, there was a part of me that wanted a resolution to the question of their gender. Just as with her previous novel, The Answers, which examined our assumptions and preconceptions about love and pain, Pew, in focussing on the big issues of the day – race, gender, and immigration – compels us to pause, reflect, and then interrogate our own hard-wired beliefs and prejudices.
Cerine Lacey is never heavy-handedly Christological. She instead alludes to the Bible with a nice casualness, as if the dragging in of all that baggage is our problem ... Pew, Lacey’s fourth novel is splendid—beautifully written and pleasingly concise, with an eerie atmosphere somehow perfect for times in which, as one character remarks, 'everything is just so strange lately' ... the writing is clear, and events and dialogue are effortless to follow ... The novel scrutinises both our need to classify one another and our mysterious notion of identity ... Tonally pitch-perfect, Pew’s dislocated voice is mournfully elegiac ... I can’t over-emphasise how sweetly, swiftly and entertainingly this book proceeds, or how exquisitely the prose is crafted on every page.
The novel compensates for its protagonist’s muffled inner life in two ways. First, by letting various secondary characters deliver actual, outward monologues instead of inner ones, sprawling and dialectal rants that often stumble on insights or heighten dramatic tension ... 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 is an avid listener and a noticing machine ... Through the accumulation of poetic description, we glimpse Pew’s feelings and sensibility, perhaps more acutely than we would if Pew told us directly ... Lacey, in fact, accurately represents a typical predicament of modernity: being dissatisfied with one’s body and its tiresome maintenance, yet not having much of a soul to speak of.
Catherine 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.
Lacey is a gifted writer, on par with the best of horror writers at ratcheting up tension ... Lacey makes a strong case against the human desire to size up and categorize the people we meet ... We never quite find out [who or what Pew is] ... Maybe that’s Lacey’s way of telling us we don’t need to know—Pew just is. But it’s deeply unsatisfying in a book that starts with such promise.
The monologues of the townsfolk are flat lemonade; surely rambling speech is the easiest, laziest way of filling a page. Initially Pew promises to be one part Holden Caulfield, one part Eleanor Oliphant, offering the unique vantage point of the outsider. Fans of Lacey’s superior debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing, will recognise something of that novel’s quirky, maudlin narrator, Elyria. But Pew’s internal commentary tends too often towards the essayistic, expounding Lacey’s grand theme of bodily dissociation ... What keeps you reading is crudely withheld information: Pew’s identity, that creepy festival. Lacey buys herself space to waffle with the promise of a plot. But the 'answers,' which come too late, are disappointing ... the ellipsis of the ending feels like a cop-out.
Pitched somewhere between Shirley Jackson’s creepy small-town horror and the seminar-room riddling of JM Coetzee ... [a] powerful new novel ... The novel’s glassy cadences and lack of speech marks heighten our sense of the narrator’s alienation; anything said to Pew appears in italics, as if filtered from an outside world ... If the almost unbearable tension more than makes up for the odd misstep, you have to accept a certain solemnity as the price of entry ... Sometimes the narrator’s emptiness seems a convenient vessel for Lacey’s tendency, shown in her previous novel, The Answers, to drift into dreamy rhetorical question ... [a] rich, enigmatic novel...
The paradox of Lacey’s novel is that for a book about the dangers of judgment it’s remarkably judgmental. The child is used to appraise the town, a ghostly presence who watches and assesses. Pew begins as an object of sympathy, but becomes an instrument of merciless high-mindedness ... Pew is less playful than [Lacey's] earlier work and wears its influences, including Ursula Le Guin and Flannery O’Connor, heavily. Pew is like O’Connor in the way a Netflix Shirley Jackson adaptation is like Shirley Jackson—which is to say not very—and its failings are only made more obvious by the similarities ... The real problem with Pew is Pew, whose pseudo-philosophical musings are sometimes intolerable ... Pew is never allowed to be lost but instead becomes a vessel for spiritual meanderings and riddles. I began to feel as if I was babysitting a child ... Lacey seems to have forgotten the greatest weapon of a writer like O’Connor: humour. Every thought Pew has is deeply earnest. Humour would rupture the reverential atmosphere; it would be a hideous distraction from the momentous sense of purpose. Anyone who has ever had a fit of giggles during a sermon knows that religion is funny: it’s funny because it’s treated with such seriousness. Some playfulness wouldn’t have undermined Lacey’s intelligence. What I was really praying for by the end of Pew was one unexpected moment.
There are some novels which are like intricately constructed traps for book reviewers. Catherine Lacey’s Pew is one of them, and it is also an alarmingly discomfiting, sublimely written novel ... How do you interpret a novel with an indecipherable centre? It’s not as if the reader isn’t granted access to Pew’s often cryptic, sometimes metaphysical musings ... [Lacey] pulls out every stop on the organ of gothic themes ... Pew is a masterpiece of misdirection. If that were just a clever parlour trick, it would be entertaining enough; but there is an importance here about how we judge. In some ways the moral is staring the reader in the face the whole time, but we are too caught up in the goose-flesh to notice ... This is a novel about preconception, moral blindness and the long fingers of guilt. I think it is the most enlightening trap I have ever encountered...
It is weird, and Lacey has fun with the weirdness, using Pew to plumb the oddness and hypocrisies of this nameless, supposedly devout small town in the American south. Lacey has always been an economical writer, and she is as taut as she’s ever been here: each of the book’s seven chapters is a day long and it moves relentlessly towards the Forgiveness festival, the nature of which remains menacingly unclear ... The competing mysteries Lacey sets running in Pew make her readers hypervigilant ... Pew is a confusing fable—there’s too much messy realism in it for its lesson to be easily understood—but it is within its messier reaches, and its concerns with inequality and prejudice, that its boldest and most brilliant effects are found.
... a brave book, in both concept and execution. These days, few writers would venture a novel structured around an almost mute enigma. Caught in the sombre reductions of the tale, though, I sometimes missed the comedy and verve of Lacey’s earlier writing ... Lacey’s tendency to push the hypothetical up against the real, the ghostly up against the grounded, can become, in Pew, a kind of drift through genres ... At such moments, one has the sense of Lacey being a little unsure of where to take her book ... Perhaps my resistance suggests that I have failed the Pew test? Certainly, this difficult and discomfiting book throws down a challenge to our readerly hospitality: in truth, I didn’t always feel inclined to take in this smudged blank of a character, to give Lacey’s cipherlike creation lodgings in the house of empathy ... One shouldn’t be surprised, amid such a searching experiment, if the novel form struggles to accommodate a deliberate affront to what novels do uniquely well: the human.
Lacey’s sardonic humor is most prominent when contending with this self-righteous lot. The townspeople espouse a tolerance that hinges on knowing exactly what they’re abiding: They can only love the sinner while hating the sin if they know who Pew is ... But that’s one of many answers that isn’t forthcoming in a disquieting narrative reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s 'The Lottery' and Ursula K. Le Guin’s 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' (which provides the epigraph to Lacey’s book). Rather than turn Pew into a vessel for some lesson, Lacey further defies expectations with a conclusion devoid of closure and rife with questions. Some of these questions are posed by Pew ... Lacey...excels at establishing the feel of a small town in the American South—the combination of intimacy and secrecy that hangs as heavy in the air as the humidity. And though her prose is a bit plainer here, she displays the same strength of insight, peeling away the niceties and social status 'to see through those masks meant to protect a person’s wants and unmet needs' ... What’s most impressive is Lacey’s restraint—like Pew, she remains an observer, withholding judgment without sparing any detail. A fabulist tale with no prescribed moral, Pew has the thrum of a foreshock, setting the reader on edge with the unlikely omens of hospitality and attrition.
Pew...manages to astound once again ... a work that draws at once from the deep wells of science fiction and Southern gothic literature ... Pew manages to avoid feeling derivative because of the strength of its deceptively simple, yet lyrical prose ... a beautiful meditation upon the nature of identity, sin, and community that should attract more readers to the work of this masterful writer.
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain. Step up Catherine Lacey, and welcome ... the method of execution is unusual ... Specifically, the story is narrated by Pew, which is a risky strategy. Would Bartleby the Scrivener have been quite so fascinating if he’d told us why he preferred not to? Not that we learn much from Pew, who’s ‘having trouble lately with remembering’. The voice is unstable, half Martian style ... half literary novelist who talks of things such as ‘bruised kindness’, whatever that is ... Pew, like Pew, is open to different interpretations, occasionally frustrating but ultimately intriguing. It keeps you thinking, and you can’t ask for much more than that.
This modern fable, written from and for an America consumed by identity politics, illustrates just how deeply embedded the impulse toward othering runs in this country ... This highly disassociated relation between Pew and their body produces some of the most stirring, beautiful sentences in the novel while chipping away at society’s compulsion to organize itself according to how our bodies look ... Despite the fact that our protagonist is nearly mute, this novel is highly oral and features several kinds of speech: gossip, monologues and parroting, for instance ... Pew’s off-kilter narrative voice, along with simmering tensions around difference and belonging, propel the reader forward.
An ambitious, often unsettling novel, Catherine Lacey‘s Pew hits hard in early chapters, landing concepts and provocations, asking big questions about race, personhood, citizenship, gender and how we make decisions with what can seem like pitch-perfect restraint ... Part of what makes the early going so good is this central character’s refreshing, chilling, ultra-articulate reverse perspective on a town that may not be so wellmeaning after all ... It’s a high-wire act, this tabula rasa of a narrator passing cool judgment on those around them, with potential disaster looming and readers primed by everything from 'The Lottery' to Midsommar for a horrific payoff. The mechanism can withstand only so much tension, and only if the calibration is fine. Sadly, it isn’t. The whole story is thrown off balance by the introduction of another adopted outsider, Nelson ... All might have been forgiven if the true nature of the festival provided for a more forceful revelation ... the final scene has the kind of balloon-fizzling feel of a minor M. Night Shyamalan movie ... the vivid promise of a big finish gives way to a heart-sinking feeling that the real reckoning is yet to come.
... marvelously elusive ... despite the book’s fundamental enigmas, the depiction of the community, with its hidden fears and traumas, is splayed-open and movingly vulnerable ... Ms. Lacey is interested in peeling back the ritual of confession and forgiveness, finding dark correspondences with cruelty (the way that confession resembles interrogation) and collective amnesia (the way that forgiveness prompts forgetfulness) ... Ms. Lacey’s is a ghostly, largely ungraspable fiction that dreams of 'the idea of a disembodied world.'
Several ancient religious cultures used scapegoat rituals to cast their sins from their midst. While Pew’s scapegoating in this more traditional sense becomes a bit more understood by the end of this slim novel, by that point it is obvious that Pew has been burdened by the sins of the community the whole week. There is not a lot of clarity in Pew, but there is much insight --- insight into the fluidity of identity, the hypocrisy of the fanatical, the lasting effects of trauma, and the horrific power of hate, fear and complacency. Lacey references other writers and looks obliquely but unblinkingly at issues of race, gender, power and religion in the U.S. ... may leave some readers dissatisfied. Because Pew is so enigmatic and Lacey doesn’t allow Pew to be quite anything at all, the already dark story veers to the dystopian, even as it is firmly set in the here and now. There is a lot to unpack and puzzle out in Pew, and readers surely will come to their own conclusions about the culmination of the story. Overall, this is a worthwhile read, both frustrating and compelling, and written with an interesting, quite literary style and a provocative thoughtfulness.
An ambitious fable that...explores the human need to classify along with the narrowness of the human imagination. The townspeople’s urgent need to know just who and what Pew is appears shallow, even racist, when their level of care seems to ebb and flow with this information or lack of it. With creepy allusions to Shirley Jackson’s 'The Lottery' and a timely exploration of gender’s mutability, Pew is provocative and suspenseful, a modern-day parable about how our fear of otherness stands in the way of our compassion.
... a novel full of jarring, surreal encounters and surprising turns ... You can absolutely imagine the novel being made into a dark indie film by the Coen brothers or David Lynch. But it also has something in common, too, with Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector ... Lacey’s novel has the feeling of a modern-day morality tale, only you’re never quite sure what the moral is. At times, it’s a bit too self-consciously enigmatic ... Lacey sustains the doleful atmosphere to a climax that is both cathartic and creepy ... Since the figure of Pew is such a silent, enigmatic void, Lacey takes the idea of the passive protagonist to an extreme. She is good at capturing speech, simple statements that are imbued with years of pain, trauma and thwarted hopes. The people Pew encounters are in search of a meaning for what they’ve endured. But what if, she suggests, there isn’t any?
If Pew is a criticism of religion in its social and institutional forms, it is also a fairly religious book ... both a social novel, dramatizing prejudice and the need to control, and a psychological one, concerned with the construction of the self. The book implicates the one in the other. Pew shows how the collective psyche of a society identifies and orders our bodies, and in so doing limits our knowledge of ourselves. Lacey is interested in asking questions beyond those limits ... urges us to see past appearances.
Lacey's quietly provocative novel is brilliantly composed ... She shines a light on how complicated people are and the dangers of judging others based on appearance, as Pew’s ambiguity reveals the true nature of the novel’s characters.
Working with the spiritual and social notions of the stranger and the other, Lacey...creates an amorphously Christlike figure who comes to represent whatever people want to see, good or bad. With echoes of some of Shirley Jackson’s work, this is a complex, many-faceted fable about religion, hypocrisy, forgiveness, and how society defines social identity.
Lacey showcases a keen ear for the lilting, sometimes bombastic music of human speech that reveals more than her speakers intend ... Lacey’s talent shines in this masterful work, her best yet.
Lacey (Certain American States, 2018, etc.)—spare and elegant as ever—creates a story that feels at the same time mythological and arrestingly like life ... Darkly playful; a warning without a moral.
