The narrator of Catherine Lacey's Pew wakes up one morning in a church, where they've taken shelter for the night. It's a Sunday morning, so the service has begun, and the members of the church are a little surprised to see the narrator lying in their pew. But they are compassionate people--or perhaps they like to think of themselves as compassionate people--so they take in this obvious vagrant and give them a place to stay. Because the narrator won't tell anyone their name, or even speak, they christen them "Pew."
Pew is of indeterminate age, race, and sex. Some look at them and fill in the blanks on their own accord: they see a girl, a boy, a young person, an older person, a white person, a person who is "brown," like another refugee adoptee in town. Those who are more confused beg Pew to tell them: What are you, Pew? But Pew will not tell, and perhaps does not know. For the members of this community, Pew's indeterminacy is a threat, an obstacle into sorting them into an ordered society: "It's what makes us civilized," one person says, "we can identify ourselves and we can identify each other! That's how we keep track of things, hold people accountable. That's how we know who were' related to and who's related to us." Is Pew one of us--or one of them?
Over a week, Pew is shuttled between various members of the congregation, some of whom are kinder than others, but all of whom are baffled by Pew. They do speak, sometimes, but never much, and only to those who seem a little on the margins of the community themselves. And yet Pew has a way of getting people to open up: a man tells Pew of his despair over his daughter's recent conversion to Christianity; an old woman confesses that her husband once lynched four black men. It's Pew's nullity, the sense they give of a blank space waiting to be filled, that allows people to unburden themselves this way. It seems obvious to me--and bolstered by Lacey's reference to Carson McCullers in the acknowledgements--that Pew is modeled on the character of Singer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a deaf-mute whose silence allows all of the other characters to imagine he is just like them. Lacey takes the character of Singer and turns the dials to eleven, so that the blankness becomes not just appealing but also threatening.
What I admired most about Pew is that it manages to tie together disparate types of prejudice--racism and sexism, principally--in a way that explores the way they function at deep levels. It doesn't seem cheap ("We're all one race--the human race") but it does expose the way our craving for stable identities is, in part, insidious. The novel also offers a critique of the way that the modern church deals with these issues: we're told that Pew has arrived just in time for something called the "Forgiveness Festival," and that any rumors of ritual human sacrifices are just rumors. When the Forgiveness Festival does come, at the book's climax, it's pretty anodyne: people wander around a big room blindfolded, bumping into each other and confessing their most horrible sins. Then they take the blindfolds off and offer each other forgiveness.
I'm a big believer in forgiveness; I think our larger culture actually has no sense of what forgiveness is or how it might be conducted. But Lacey's more targeted critique is spot on: this model of forgiveness does nothing to heal the real divisions between people, or address systems of power, especially in a town we know has a long and deeply rooted history of racist violence. How can a community heal if it literally blinds itself to pain? And yet, we register the irony of what we are willing to see and not see: the people of the town cannot deal with the limitations of perception that Pew presents. The people of Pew demand everything be visible but the way we harm each other; that's something that remains hidden.
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