Pew: A Novel

By Catherine Lacey

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374720131

Catherine Lacey

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing and The Answers, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. Born in Mississippi, she is based in Chicago.

Book preview

SLEEP

IF YOU EVER NEED TO—and I hope you never need to, but a person cannot be sure—if you ever need to sleep, if you are ever so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones, and you’re walking along a dark road with no one, and you’re not sure how long you’ve been walking, and you keep looking down at your hands and not recognizing them, and you keep catching a reflection in darkened windows and not recognizing that reflection, and all you know is the desire to sleep, and all you have is no place to sleep, one thing you can do is look for a church.

What I know about churches is that they usually have many doors and often at least one of those doors, late at night, has been left unlocked. The reason churches have so many doors is that people tend to enter and leave churches in groups, in a hurry. It seems people have a lot of reasons for entering a church and perhaps even more reasons for leaving one, but the only reason I’ve gone to a church was to sleep. The reasons I’ve left a church were to avoid being caught sleeping or because I’d already been caught sleeping and was being asked to leave. Those are the only reasons I can remember, though I’m having trouble lately with remembering. I left some place, began walking, slept in all those churches, then everything else happened—that’s all I know.

I don’t think they’re so great—churches. I don’t think they’re so great at all. That’s not what I mean when I say you can go to one when you’re tired. I’m not talking about grace or deliverance—a person cannot really speak of such things. What I mean is a church is a structure with walls and a roof and pretty windows that make it so you can’t see outside. They’re like casinos in that way, or shopping malls or those big drugstores with all the aisles, music piped in from somewhere, the endless search for that final thing.

But a church is also a building, often a sturdy building, and it can keep the outside far from you and when the outside is far enough from you, that is when a person can sleep. One thing it seems that every body needs is to sleep, and one thing people might not always have when they need it is a place to sleep or enough time to travel to a place where they can sleep, and so—a church. Maybe a church will fix this problem for you someday or maybe it already has.

For some time, I only slept in churches. A few nights I tried to sleep in some woods or a bathroom stall or behind a gas station, and I took a few good naps in a cemetery, but the only place I could ever sleep for any real time back then was a church. Since then I am not sure I’ve completely fallen asleep or woken up. Days and nights unspool together. Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. I’ve received no word from death’s brother. I have not entered a church in some time.

The large churches, that’s the sort of church you’ll want to look for if you need to sleep. The large churches have more doors that might be unlocked and more unlit spaces between all the buildings and rooms and hallways and playgrounds and gymnasiums and a kitchen or two and sometimes they even have a smaller chapel next to the larger one and the smaller chapel is almost always left unlocked. Also, the people that go to a large church are often too various to agree about anything in particular, so if you are caught sleeping there, the person catching you will likely not have a clear idea about how to proceed with getting rid of you (whether to call the police or the pastor, whether to give you something or take something from you) and people who are unsure of how to proceed are easy to escape. I have done this again and again. It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church—so vast, so many rooms—to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.

I don’t know how it all came to this.

It seems that time is somewhere else and what I can see here is not the present, but is, instead, the future, an eventual future, and somehow the present moment is back there somewhere I cannot reach and I’m stuck living here, in some future time. This body hangs beneath me, carries me around, but it does not seem to belong to me, and even if I could see them, I would not recognize my own eyes.

Now, never sleeping, I think often of the way life blinks at you when waking. I miss that kind of beginning, being given another day, taking another day, something that’s yours, only yours, only yours and everyone else’s.

If you do manage to have a night’s sleep in a church, you’ll notice how nice it is to wake up there. It will almost make you want to believe in God if you don’t believe in God, and if you do believe in God, it will be a nice pat on the back for you. It must be so nice to be patted on the back in this way, to walk always followed by this constant, gentle pat.

IN A GAS STATION BATHROOM—piss on the floor, tampon machine, urinal, an open stall—I locked the door and stripped bare to throw water on my skin.

In a cracked mirror I saw these legs, saw these arms. I shut my eyes and tried to remember that body, but under shut lids the mind saw nothing, could not remember in what it was living. Again, I opened my eyes—saw this body. Maybe wider in some places, narrower in others, and some parts were soft, and some were firm, and where my legs met, there was something I knew to protect, though I could not say why.

When I put clothes on again, all memory of what this body was or is vanished beneath the cloth. It must be that I—whatever I am—am lying on the floor of a canoe, lying there, looking up at the sky. I am unable to sit up or move. I cannot remember getting into the canoe. Sometimes I hear people speaking to the canoe as if they are not aware that I am in here. Yes, that’s what it feels like, what living feels like. Why is it so difficult to say as much? It never seems I can describe it clearly enough.

Once someone said I had a slender neck, a woman’s neck, they said, a woman’s neck growing from the thick shoulders of a man, but maybe it was the other way around—slender shoulders and a thick neck. Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told. I look at my skin and I cannot say what shade it is. I look into a mirror and see nothing in particular. It seems I am sitting somewhere within all this skin and muscle and bone and fat and hair. Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained? Over time, I know, bodies change—they expand and contract, skin turns papery or thick, new bodies grow within other bodies, limbs grow musky and must be cleaned, organs smuggle tumors through the dark—but isn’t there something else? Something unseen. Why can’t we ever speak to it?

In a gas station late at night the cashier gave me a biscuit and a wet hot dog. She showed me black-and-white photographs of herself from long ago—a young woman in high white boots, short hair round and firm and pure black. There in the gas station her hair had gone loose and gray. She did not ask me my name. She called me baby, called me sugar, gave me a sip of whiskey from her flask and let me sleep behind the counter. We were some distance from anything else, flat nothing around us, an unearthly glow rising from a town on the horizon. I slept on the floor while she sat up on a stool holding a newspaper in her lap, the other hand resting near a rifle. She was one of the few I’ve known who somehow knew to peer over the edge of this canoe and see me lying here—hello.

What are you? I was sometimes asked and I know it’s rude to answer a question with a question but I have sometimes allowed myself to be rude in this way. I used to ask those askers, What are you? And what a horrible question to say or hear. I regret ever asking it. Sometimes they answered me: I’m a Christian, an American, I’m black, white, not from here, I’m hungry, I’m tired, angry, a woman, a man, a gay man, a pastor, Republican, mother, son, I’m forty-three years old, I’m homeless, or sometimes they answered me with a laugh that rose and fell in their chests before it wandered away, leaving nothing behind.

When dawn came that morning in the gas station, the cashier gave me a carton of milk, said to come back if I ever needed. She never asked me what I was.

In the dark of the night with no one else around, she spoke to me—

I’m the only one who will work on Sunday. They all want to buy gas on Sunday, sure, but don’t ask them to sell it. Strange thing is, people not working on Sunday is all that makes this place any good but it’s also everything that’s wrong with it.

She was quiet a long time, shaking her head, riffling through the newspaper.

Anyway the only good preacher I know isn’t sitting up in any church just to get looked at. She’s just the one that keeps the children all day, and sits in the hospice at night. She don’t say nothing about God, the Bible. Don’t have to. You see the way those children look at her—ask them what they know about. They know plenty.

SUNDAY

I WOKE UP ON A PEW, sleeping on my side, knees bent. I did not move. I felt the warmth of another body near my head. I looked toward the floor, saw navy blue pant legs and two pale brown shoes. Above: the underside of a stubbly jaw. A large voice in the room like faraway thunder. My joints ached. I felt I’d been sleeping for weeks, heavy, immovable, mind empty, this body stiff against thin cushions.

Nearby was another person, in a blue dress that hung loose and long. Pale brown hair pulled into a knot at the neck. On the other side of this person were three children, boys, in little suits like the person sitting beside my head. The smallest was asleep. The largest was alert, staring forward, thick navy book in his hands. The middle-size boy was staring at me, and when our eyes met, he tugged on the dress. The person in the dress reached down and held that tiny hand still a moment, squeezed hard. The child grimaced. Hand released hand. A thought slowly came to me that this is the sort of person called a mother. A mother wears dresses, holds hands. Sometimes a word like this would appear, spoken by some silent voice.

Again the middle boy’s eyes fell on me, his face more troubled this time, an angry, excited pain. The voice at the front of the room said some well-worn words and every voice in the room replied with their own well-worn words and the boy, still staring at me, murmured along.

The organ shouted a long chord, an opening, a call. The pews creaked as the bodies stood. The boy who had been staring at me grabbed the smallest, sleeping boy by the armpits and shoved him up to stand. Everyone sang in drone-y unison. Still, I did not move, stayed still on my side. The boy crawled down the pew toward me, pulled at my shoe until the mother reached back to smack the child’s head. A mother smacks heads. A mother wears a pale blue dress and smacks heads.

Slowly, I stood to join them, was handed an open book, a hymnal. A finger pointed to a line of words, traced them along the page. I did not sing. Of most things I felt uncertain, but I was at least certain I would not sing.

Everyone sat again so I did as well. The larger bodies—the mother, the father (The father? The father)—did not look at me, acted as if I had always and would always be sitting and standing in this church, this pew. I was one of the things here: a hymnal, a Bible, an offering envelope, a tiny pencil. A person draped in heavy cloth stood at the front of the church and said things in such a way to make those words seem obvious and true, how simple the world was, how no one need worry about anything, how everything was here, all the answers were here and we could all just accept them, roll over and accept them like a sleeping body accepts air.

A gold plate was passed up and down the aisles, hand to hand to hand. People dropped in coins, bills, and envelopes, then passed the plates back to people who carried them to the altar like a casket toward its

Reviews for Pew

[castlelass · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In a small town in the American South, a young person is found sleeping on a church pew. A couple takes the youth home and offers a place to stay. When they ask questions, they are met with silence, so they decide to call the youth “Pew.” The town is a (so-called) Christian community that holds a (fictitious) “Forgiveness Festival” each year (more like a cult), and Pew has arrived during the week leading up to it. This is an (intentionally) uncomfortable book. It focuses on the townspeople’s need to label Pew in terms of race, gender, and place of origin. The actions taken by the community are more selfish than kind. Pew is the narrator but tells the reader very little, keeping everything vague and distant. I appreciate the message but found it difficult to feel engaged. The style and structure just did not work well for me.

[alexrichman_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A brilliantly creepy build-up that covers a lot of interesting ground before ultimately fizzling out in a rather underwhelming fashion. Like reading Nope

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Catherine Lacey’s though-provoking novel, Pew, a stranger appears out of nowhere in a small town in the American South, discovered asleep in a church by the congregation on Sunday morning. The townspeople are intrigued and mystified by this new presence, but also disturbed because the stranger does not speak, is androgynous and racially ambiguous in appearance, and, though youthful, is of indeterminate age. The Reverend decides that the stranger can go by the name Pew, “Until you get around to telling us something different,” and a young couple, Steven and Hilda, agree to take Pew into their home. The story is narrated by Pew, who seems just as bewildered by the circumstances of his/her arrival in the town as the residents are, and the action takes place in the fraught week leading up to the Forgiveness Festival, a sacred ritual of great and solemn consequence for the town’s many believers. Lacey’s intent here seems to be to illustrate how human behaviours and valuations are influenced by assumptions we make about one another based on physical appearance and personal data such as name, age, gender, place of origin, religious affiliation, etc. Pew stirs up confusion, frustration, unease, even hostility among the townsfolk because in his/her case none of these customary designations are known. Pew’s silent, watchful presence remains a disturbing mystery from his/her first appearance in the church to his/her participation in the Forgiveness Festival at the novel’s ambiguous conclusion. But it’s not as if the reader knows more than anyone else: though Pew narrates, he/she shares no memories of a previous life: Pew seems to have sprung fully formed out of the earth. Lacey’s narrative builds tension as Pew placidly observes the people around him/her struggling to fill the information void he/she creates with his/her withholding silence, trying to figure out how to behave toward him/her. The novel certainly raises fascinating questions about prejudice, societal inflexibility, and the compulsion to categorize people in order to deal with them whether or not those categories are appropriate or assigned fairly. But the narrative has a quality of deliberate vagueness that holds it somewhat aloof, preventing the reader from forging a meaningful connection with the characters and becoming emotionally immersed in their story. At the same time, Lacey’s prose is cool, limpid and filled with quietly memorable and insightful observations about human nature. Pew is a powerfully enigmatic work of fiction, one that—like its main character—holds its secrets close. We finish it with more questions than answers. But ambiguity is clearly fundamental to the effect Lacey is seeking to create.

[hemlokgang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A mysterious fable of sin & forgiveness, forgiveness v. forgetting, universality, suspicion, acceptance, fear of differences. A person of illusive gender, age, voice, race identity is found sleeping on a church pew, and is so named, Pew. She has no memory and is present as an observer of human hypocrisy. A fascinating, powerful piece of fiction! Incredibly thought provoking!

[librarygeek33 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is more about the residents of the town that it is about the main character, Pew. To me, it was Pew's silence that aggravated the townspeople more than its ambiguous nature. I think that's what kept me reading. What confounded me was the big buildup to the Forgiveness Festival. The book is memorable, in a way, but I forgot how the story ended about 3 minutes after I finished reading. ???

[beth.clarke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Have you ever found yourself just listening to someone and they open up and tell you things that under regular circumstances, they would never say? That's basically what happens to Pew. Since Pew doesn't speak, the strangers he meets tell stories about themselves and their families that they've never told before. It's a novel that shows the side of people that they never show. The novel explores racism, gender issues, as well as labels. Seeing it through Pew's eyes is what makes this novel feel like a fable. Pew is an observer of a community. That's what pulled me in. The ending is definitely obscure which makes this a novel that either people will love or hate. Either way, readers will be thinking about Pew long after they finish reading.

[froxgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This mysteriously unsettling novel evoked Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, and Shirley Jackson's The Lottery for me. When a mute young teenager of unknown gender and ethnicity is found sleeping on a church pew in a small Southern Bible Belt town, they are named “Pew” and taken in by an uneasy local family and introduced to neighbors in the hope that someone can get Pew to speak. Pew speaks but two words through the novel and provides only sketchy glimpses into their origin, with no explanation of why or how they ended up in the tiny community. What Pew does is to cause others to speak way more than they should, to fill in Pew's utter silence and to honor their non-judgmental mien. Most people meeting Pew in this small and insular religious hamlet become angry and frustrated by their inability to categorize or to understand this stranger in their midst. In the meantime, frightening disappearances are occurring in a neighboring county on the cusp of the annual local “Forgiveness Festival”, bringing the plot to a confusing conclusion.

[perednia_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Imagine wandering without knowing anything about oneself, except that you exist. Where did you come from? Where you going anywhere? Are you even male, female, something else? How old are you? None of these are things that matter. What does matter is finding a place to rest, maybe even sleep.Churches are good for that. And when the protagonist of Pew by Catherine Lacey finds a church in which to sleep, everyone in the strange little town in which it is located is oddly invested in knowing more. They name their newly found person Pew for being found sleeping on one. The family that takes Pew in constantly cajoles, entreats and begs Pew to reveal more. Every time one of them tries to find out more, they show their judgment even as they deny being judgmental. Just existing and resisting only by being practically non-responsive riles up doctors and church folk.The church folk are the ones who control the small town. It's nearly that time of year, when the annual Forgiveness Festival is held. Emotions are ramping up. The mood is ominous, especially for something that is supposed to be healing. And only the white people take part; the Black side of town stays away. At the same time, the news is filled with people disappearing from a nearby town.The novel begins with an epigraph of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas, and has overtones of other works, including Kafka, The Giver by Lois Shields and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The plot and the philosophical questions blend seamlessly. It is tempting both to turn the pages as quickly as possible to see what is happening, and to stop and mull over the existential questions and noticings of a stripped down character that remains a complex being.Who are we, as just ourselves? As humanity? What are we like? What are the things that make a difference? Are they physical? Mental? A part of our souls? In musings both profound and poetical, Pew and the people in this community open up myriad ways of looking at the world and ourselves. To do this with such a light touch is a remarkable accomplishment. Pew is a book worth reading more than once.

[brangwinn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When a young person is found in the pew of a church, they are invited to live with one of the church families. But when you refuse to be labeled by sex, the parishioners will tell you that you are loved by God, but you need a label. Pew remains silent, and when the subject of race is brought up along with gender its pointed out that they might be better off in the black section of town, since Pew’s color is much darker than the family with whom they are staying Things don’t get much better. I didn’t come from the south, but I came from a small conservative town, in which help and salvation was available to those that conformed to norms, and this story had the feel of reality. The most important aspects of the story seem to be the reactions of people to Pew’s not responding to them.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A town has a feeling, I remembered someone telling me long ago, because certain kinds of thought are contagious.~ from Pew by Catherine LaceyI grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Detroit and lived in and around Philadelphia as a young adult. My first time in a small city of under 8,000 left me struggling. A woman told me that everyone needed to fit into a box, and no one knew what box to put me in. When I took up quilting, people relaxed. Quilters they knew. I finally fit into a box.Nothing can be more closed than a faith community. The best are open and affirmative. The worst sort people reject outsiders who challenge their values. Been there, too. Are you with us or against us? And if you don't join them, you become the outsider, an enemy.Some humans are comfortable with ambiguity, but most want to parse the world into black and white, good and bad, male and female, us and them, liberal and conservative.Catherine Lacey's Pew introduces us to a character with no past, no name, no identity.One Sunday morning a worshipping congregation in a small town finds a being sleeping on a pew. Out of Christian charity, a family takes the foundling home. They name the being Pew.The foundling has no identifying characteristics and is mute in response to people's questions.Clothing is offered to see if Pew chooses male or female attire. The pastor tries to learn Pew's age; there are rules about how things work based on age. A social worker and a physician are brought in to discover if Pew has suffered physical or mental abuse. Pew does not respond, will not disrobe, will not speak. Pew does not know the answers to the questions being asked.Christian charity turns to self-protection, discomfort, and even fear.This community is separate from the world and has their own ritual of forgiveness. Pew has appeared a few days before the festival. It unnerves the community.There is a Shirley Jackson feel to the novel, The Lottery coming to mind. The small town, the closed society, the ritual of the scapegoat are in this novel.Pew's voice takes us into some deep territory, showing what it is like to be on the receiving end of social pressure that seeks to categorize people---put them into a box.Can't we just be and let be? Why do we have to 'fix' the things we don't understand? Must our bodily being determine our place in the human community?Pew sometimes catches a visual memory, almost can articulate a past. But words fail, they are misunderstood, and eventually forgotten. Some things are incommunicable.Members of the community project identities onto Pew, seeing what they want to see.A woman tells Pew about her son faith journey. The son determined that to truly follow the teachings of Jesus one had to give up all attachments in the world. The son gradually let go of his identity, becoming one with all creation. Her son's mystical journey of ego death has shattered his mother and she hoped to discover Pew was her lost son. Pew is shuttled from the white community to the black side of town. An old African American woman sees the 'new jesus' in Pew.People tell Pew their stories, revealing sorrows and horrible acts they would not confess to a community member.There is a lot going on in this novel, and I can't whittle it down to one idea. Perhaps readers will all see their own story in the tale, project what they want to find. I will be ruminating on this one for a long while.I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A small Southern town. A church loving community that prides itself on doing the right thing, raising their children the right way. Going about their lives in a predictable fashion, until something unpredictable happens. Attending church, they are confronted by a stranger, a young person sleeping in one of the pews. They can't tell what sex the person is, his old he is, they even disagree on his color. Who is it, where did this person come from? No one knows and this person won't or can't speak. Doing the right thing, a family takes him home. Christian charity, opening their house, and hoping they can get some answers. They name the person Pew, after the place where he/she was found.What happens after this as Pew goes from family to family, is the story. How he is treated, what people say and since this is a firstPerson narration, we learn thoughts directly from Pew.All this leads up to the Churches forgivness festival, a strange ceremony indeed. The denoument, the ending I will leave up to future readers. Strange days indeed.Beautifully written, with universal themes, Judging a person by the way one looks, and how someone that cannot be defined can cause discomfort and suspicion. I liked this, a very different type of story. One that makes the reader think.ARC from Edelweiss.