Pew by Catherine Lacey

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

The narrator of Pew is a boy or a girl of uncertain race and nationality, somewhere on the border of being a child or an adult, male or female, brown or white. The narrator has learned that church pews provide a place to sleep that is sheltered from the elements and peaceful when no service is being held. A pastor decides to call the narrator Pew after the congregation finds the stranger sleeping on a pew during a service. The couple who usually occupy that pew decide it is their Christian duty to bring the stranger home. They soon become uncomfortable and even a bit fearful because Pew will not answer their questions about just who or what Pew is.

Pew understands English but rarely speaks. Pew privately engages with a refugee child named Nelson who meets Pew at another home where Pew is taken for meetings with a therapist. Nelson tells Pew that his “whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was some kind of misunderstanding. Must have been some other guy.” Nelson notes that Pew’s skin sometimes seems lighter and sometimes darker. One of the community leaders notes that he’s never seen a person who looks quite like Pew, presumably because it is so hard to pin down what Pew looks like. Gazing down at “this body” in private, Pew wonders: “Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?”

The decision to make Pew an indefinite person, someone who defies labels, is a stroke of genius that allows Catherine Lacey to explore the nature of identity and how important identity is to people who don’t know how to react to someone until that person has been defined. Few of the characters can accept that Pew is just a person. They want Pew to be a male or female person or a gay or straight person or a sexually traumatized person or a black or white or foreign or American person. The need to label Pew before deciding how (or whether) to interact with Pew is a theme that permeates the story. The ability to “identify each other,” in the words of a community leader, is what makes us “civilized.” Another community member worries about allowing Pew to interact with the community’s teens (despite Pew’s lack of inclination to do so) without knowing if Pew is “this way or that.”

The Reverend is quite insistent on knowing whether Pew is biologically a boy or girl (you are what God made you, the Reverend insists, you don’t get to decide) but he doesn’t want to find out the hard way. He insists that all people are entitled to “the same kind of respect,” regardless of gender beliefs or national origin, but Pew wonders how many kinds of respect exist. When Pew remains silent rather than answering questions, most of the community views him with even greater suspicion on the theory that someone who doesn’t speak must have something to hide. Pew, in fact, has nothing to hide but nothing to share. Pew has no memory of parents or home or belonging. Pew’s memories are primal. Pew remembers hunger. Pew remembers the terror of being a child “so small that anyone could just pick you up and take you anywhere at any time,” a terror that makes Pew feel “it’s a wonder there are people at all.”

While the community claims a religious motivation to help Pew (“the whole congregation is concerned, but we know God sent you to us for a reason”), it is clear they want to know how to classify Pew so they can send this stranger to a place where s/he might be “more comfortable” — i.e., somewhere that isn’t here, a place where they won’t be reminded that Pew exists. They claim to want what is best for Pew while reserving the right to decide for themselves what is best for Pew, a decision that will clearly be driven by whatever they feel is best for their own lives.

A religious festival is approaching that fills everyone with dread. The festival was originally seen as a way to reconcile the white community with the segregated black community, although the black community no longer participates. The concept of wearing masks to confess sins at a festival is sufficiently intriguing to warrant a novel of its own, but it is just one of several background elements that create a vague sense of unease that permeates the novel. A nurse at a clinic where Pew refuses to undress is disturbed by some people who recently appeared. Some sort of unrest in a neighboring county is dominating the news. Characters speak of living in a time of evilness before they turn off the news and change the topic, avoiding any substantive discussion of the evil that surrounds and threatens to invade their community. All of this unrest is deliberately undefined, a sort of background noise that heightens the reader’s sense of anxiety as the story moves forward.

The novel contains stories within stories. A (presumably) gay character talks to Pew about how the community isn’t so bad because “no one acts ugly to me. Not to my face.” The character wants Pew to know that being different is tolerated, if not accepted, by the community. Another character talks to Pew about the quiet grief he endures regarding his daughter’s decision to renounce science and equality to marry into the church: “what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become — what kind of grief is that?” A woman named Tammy remembers a Latvian woman who was kind to her when she ran away from home at 17, an immigrant who had to make a new life among strangers, a woman with whom Tammy instantly bonded because they both felt misplaced, a sensation that has gripped Tammy since childhood, when she felt that her existence was an accident. Tammy and her husband later tell a tragic story about ill-fated peacocks, ending with the moral: “There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know until it’s too late.”

There is so much stuffed into this relatively short novel that it might take two or three readings to unpack it all. I can imagine professors using it as a teaching tool, not just in literature classes but in philosophy and a variety of social sciences. From a casual reader’s standpoint, the story is beautifully told, raising universal questions that are particularly timely given the worldwide rise of nationalism and white supremacy and intolerance of nontraditional gender identities. Pew is provocative in its multi-faceted portrayal of people who feel like outcasts because they do not easily fit within the narrow boundaries that a community is prepared to accept, no matter how much the community might claim to treat everyone with respect. Some readers might dislike Pew for its ambiguity, but the importance of feeling okay with ambiguity is the novel’s point. I’ve never read a novel that makes the point quite so effectively.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Burglar in Short Order by Lawrence Block

Published by Subterranean Press on February 29, 2020

Lawrence Block has been a prolific crime writer since the 1970s, when he decided that crime might pay more than softcore porn. The two primary series protagonists he has gifted the world are Matthew Scudder (beginning with The Sins of the Fathers) and a much lighter series about Bernie Rhodenbarr, the last of the gentleman burglars. He knocked out a bunch of other crime novels over the years, including an amusing series I admire about a hit man named Keller.

Block has slowed his production a in his senior years. He suggests in his afterword that this is likely to be Rhodenbarr’s final contribution to the world of crime fiction characters, and that the volume might be Block’s final contribution to crime fiction. The Burglar in Short Order is a collection of stories and essays, ranging from 1977 to 2018, about Rhodenbarr. The collection also features a new introduction that provides a retrospective of Rhodenbarr’s life, and an afterword that discuss the character’s future, which he intends to experience in privacy, free from the scrutiny of curious readers.

Aspiring writers might be heartened by Block’s story of how, a month’s rent away from homelessness, he was considering burglary as a profession, imagined some farfetched stumbling blocks to a life of crime, and turned one of his imaginings into the plot for a novel that saved his career. Between writing novels regularly and selling movie rights to some of them, Block has done well for himself without actually turning to crime.

Speaking of movie rights, another essay provides Block’s take on a movie called Burglar that cast Whoopie Goldberg in the role of Rhodenbarr. In Block’s view, it was not an inspired decision. Like me, Block admires Whoopie and finds Bobcat Goldthwait to be a bit grating. I haven’t seen the movie, but in Block’s view, Whoopie did the best she could with substandard material. It isn’t a movie he felt the need to see twice.

One of two excellent stories in the volume involves a tabloid that hires Rhodenbarr to break into Graceland and photograph Elvis’ bedroom. In the other, Rhodenbarr solves a locked room mystery involving the death of a book lover. A few of the stories, a few pages each, are essentially a setup and a punchline. Some of those describe a visit by an unnamed narrator to the bookshop that Rhodenbarr owns and a conversation that ensues between the two men. The afterword (again written as a conversation between a narrator and Rhodenbarr) makes clear that the unidentified narrator is, in fact, Block, paying a visit to his literary creation.

Although Rhodenbarr has not aged over the years, the world that surrounds him has moved forward. Times have changed. Rhodenbarr’s bookstore never made money (it gave him a safe haven and the chance to meet literate women while earning his real income at night), but it has recently started to lose money. Fewer people read, and those who do read books digitally. If they actually want to hold a book or if they want to read one they can’t find on a Kindle, they order it online. Independent bookstores, Rhodenbarr laments, have been lost to progress.

Block admits that, unlike Rhodenbarr, he has gotten old, the biggest mistake he ever made. He has been editing anthologies in recent years, but he sounds very much as if this volume is his final work, or close to it. His fans might want to pick it up just to pay their respects to an excellent crime writer. New fans might be better served by starting with The Sins of the Fathers and by browsing his other novels.

RECOMMENDED

Out of Time by David Klass

Published by Dutton on July 7, 2020

Out of Time tells a story that, in most respects, thriller fans have encountered many times before. A bright young man, living in the shadow of his celebrated law enforcement father but never meeting the father’s standards, decides to show his dad he’s got the right stuff by joining the FBI. He defies orders issued by his less competent, publicity-seeking superiors and follows his instincts to catch the bad guy. He manages to do this by thinking like the criminal he’s chasing, which of course he does with a nearly telepathic ability. The bright young man is chivalrous (he has reservations about sleeping with a married woman but agrees to be seduced when he learns that her husband is a cheating cad). He is dedicated but feels a conflict between his need to bring the killer to justice and his support for the killer’s cause. The bright young man has a boring name (Tom Smith), an appropriate moniker for a character so dull and predictable that the book, although an unchallenging summer read, is difficult to finish.

When the thriller protagonist is dull and predictable, a reader might hope that the villain will be interesting. Unfortunately, the villain — known for much of the novel as the Green Man — is so unbelievable that asking a reader to be concerned about any threat he might pose to society is asking too much. He is an eco-terrorist, a creature that exists largely in the imaginations of lobbyist and public relations firms that work for environmentally destructive industries. The Green Man starts the novel by blowing up a dam, drowning some children in the process. He has committed several other vaguely described crimes that also killed children. Had David Klass spent more effort detailing those crimes, explaining exactly how they were accomplished, he might have added a spicy dash of credibility to a bland and unbelievable plot.

The Green Man supposedly feels conflicted that he is killing innocent kids to call attention to climate change and other vaguely described environmental perils, but he ultimately feels justified because his cause is noble. He is egged on in that regard by his wife and a couple of other people, none of whom struck me as the type of folk who believe that killing children is a smart way to gain followers to a cause. The notion that collateral damage to human lives will win support for an environmental cause rather than hardening existing opposition is hopelessly naïve. That Green Man (or his wife or his other high IQ supporters) would hold that belief is inconsistent with Klass’ portrayal of the Green Man as a rational, well-educated individual. The Green Man is presented as a conflicted fanatic with a skewed moral compass, but the absence of conflict defines a fanatic. The character simply doesn’t ring true. His “God forgive me for killing innocents” prayers are entirely artificial. The Green Man and his co-conspirators are so superficial that only superficial readers are likely to accept them as people who could exist in the real world. Additional efforts at characterization, particularly giving the Green Man a plucky daughter he meets for the first time in the novel, are too trite and manipulative to make the reader care about the man.

Tom Smith is supposed to be complex but really, he’s pointlessly confused. He supports the Green Man’s cause but not his methods, although he seems to hope that the methods will wake up the world, as if blowing up dams and tanks filled with the waste from fracking is going to win hearts and minds. I thought Tom should crap or get off the pot, but he stays pretty constipated until the end, when he more or less cops out by making the easy choice that Klass hands him.

By the novel’s end, it’s not clear if the reader is meant to like the Green Man or to despise him. Since Klass didn’t make me care about him or believe the story, I saw little reason to like or dislike him. Instead, I was looking forward to forgetting about him and moving on to a better book.

On rare occasions, a novel might succeed despite its unconvincing characters by telling a captivating story. Klass doesn’t do that in Out of Time. The story generates no suspense. The final chapters, in which characters attempt to reconcile their emotions, fail to ring true. I will give Klass credit for writing an unpredictable ending, but that wasn’t enough to save the novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Revelators by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on July 14, 2020

The Revelators is another eventful chapter in the life of Quinn Colson, the (currently suspended) sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi. There is never a shortage of plot in a Colson novel. Ace Atkins doubles the characterization and triples the story that a typical thriller writer manufactures.

If you haven’t read a Colson novel before, this is probably not the place to start. Atkins does a good job of reminding readers of significant events in earlier novels, but keeping track of the plot and all the characters would be difficult without having a working knowledge of the last three or four books. Since this novel brings a continuing storyline to a close, a reader might want to start fresh with the next one — assuming there is a next one (the last chapter leaves open that possibility). Otherwise, a reader with some free time might want to read each of the ten Quinn Colson novels in order to catch up with one of the better series that thrillerworld has to offer.

When we last saw Quinn, he’d gotten himself shot by a fellow named Sam at the instruction of Fannie Hathcock, who has been responsible for a fair amount of killing in the last few novels. Fannie operates an establishment in Tibbehah County that the locals colorfully describe as a titty bar. Fannie also runs guns and engages in other illegal activities under the protection of a corrupt governor named Jimmy Vardaman. Although the governor removed Quinn from his office as sheriff pending an investigation on trumped up charges of misconduct, Fannie decided he was still a threat to her business and decided to remove him. That Fannie has removed several others (one, in this novel, by hammering his face into goo) has won her some enemies. She carries on because she enjoys the protection not only of the governor but of Brock Tanner, an arrogant self-promoter who has been appointed as sheriff pending the outcome of the investigation into Quinn.

Quinn is coping with pain from gunshot wounds and with a worrying need for the opioids that allow him to function in an unofficial law enforcement role. He has a baby on the way, but he’s assisting with a federal investigation of all the corrupt elements in Tibbehah County. He’s also trying to protect his sister, Caddy Colson, who is making enemies by helping undocumented immigrants. Caddy is unsure what to make of a long-time admirer, recently released from prison but apparently working for Fannie. But she is sure that her pre-teen son Jason is in serious trouble when he disappears with a young girl who, with some other girls from immigrant families, has been abducted.

The plot is even more complicated than the elements that I’ve sketched. The characters, as always, change and struggle with change as they respond to adverse circumstances. Following those changes is one of the pleasures of reading this series. Quinn gets emotional assists from series regulars Boom Kimbrough and Lillie Virgil as well as his wife Maggie. Lillie also helps out with her favorite shotgun.

Background elements, always crucial to the series, focus on Mississippi’s enduring corruption and the unrepentant racism of its significant population of Confederate flag waving residents. The drive to deport undocumented immigrants who have been working productively and peacefully in a job that most Americans would shun — replaced, at the governor’s instigation, by private prison labor — adds additional social relevance to a series that always has a timely take on Mississippi’s stubborn refusal to join the present. The 32 children the deportees leave behind become Caddy’s latest cause.

Atkins’ great gift is to showcase the decency that can be found in every corner of society, even when indecency seems overwhelming. Good people who care about others, not just themselves, come in all colors and nationalities. Atkins always tells good stories about good people. He does it again in The Revelators.

RECOMMENDED

Cool for America by Andrew Martin

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 7, 2020

Relationships are complicated. When they aren’t working, they suck. That’s one theme that runs through the stories collected in Cool for America. We are fundamentally incapable of communicating truths to each other, of understanding our parents or partners or feeling understood and appreciated in the way we hope to be. Or maybe the problem (as a character suggests in “A Dog Named Jesus”) is that we are so rarely on the same page at the same time: whatever one partner wants to do (go the Farmer’s Market) is the opposite of the other partner's desire (stay home and read a book). A different character in that story decides that of the “many ways to avoid stupid, crippling loneliness,” the best is to “complicate your attachments to such a degree that they hardly seemed like attachments at all.”

Some of the stories in this collection are set in Missoula, Montana. Characters, mostly transplants from more cosmopolitan places, tend to talk about wolves, forestry, conservation, music, and books they haven’t read. The characters in a few stories overlap. The most memorable of those is a snarky woman in her mid-20s named Leslie who has an affinity for gin. We learn in “No Cops” that she was “thoroughly and expensively educated” but put all of that behind her to work as a copy editor at an alternative newspaper where, she assumes, she’s not expected to turn up sober. Leslie moves from sexual encounter to sexual encounter through the stories, sometimes with short-term boyfriends, occasionally with a stranger. Despite being opinionated, she considers herself “a person without well-established and verifiable thoughts and opinions about anything.” She promises herself she’ll start writing but she’s having difficulty finding purpose or direction. Leslie declares in “A Dog Named Jesus” that she needs to leave Missoula, a place where she is rotting and forgotten. Whether she will do so is up in the air.

The protagonist of “Attention” is a lonely woman who regards her loneliness as a matter of choice. She worries that “the significant disasters of life — illness, marriage, children” approach “less forthrightly than, say, a friend offering her some really excellent cocaine.”

The title story, and my favorite in the volume, is narrated by a man who occasionally travels to Montana to teach a photography class and ends up stuck there on crutches. His friendship with his climbing partner becomes strained when the climbing partner’s wife becomes sexually aggressive, although the wife finds the mess she caused to be “clarifying.”

My second favorite, perhaps because it is so different from all the rest, is “The Boy Vet.” The corrupt vet wants the narrator to pay for surgery for an injured corgi and then to adopt it, an act that the narrator knows will not sit well with his living partner. I also admired “Deep Cut,” about two friends who go to a hardcore concert and sort of have each other’s backs when the crowd becomes both rough and unexpectedly kind. The injured narrator decides against stitches because “preserving the evidence of the wound might keep me from turning my youth into cheap nostalgia. As if a scar, of all things, was capable of that.”

A couple in “The Charged Party” have experimentally reunited after a six-month separation. They are trying to find a mutual path to parenting their OCD daughter. The father has trust issues because his partner had an affair, but since he can no longer trust any women, he might as well live with but not trust the mother of his child. Maybe she’s really a decent person, a thought he prefers to the possibility that “she was a fundamentally different person from the one I’d always thought her to be,” a thought “so painful that I tried not to let myself entertain it too often.

The other stories are less interesting. “Bad Feelings” is essentially a story about a young man who is having a bad day, perhaps as a precursor to a bad life. In “With the Christopher Kids,” Steven and his sister Patricia are having a bad Christmas weekend with their mother, as part of bad lives in which they switch off being active drug addicts and recovering addicts, an arrangement that always leaves one of them sufficiently sober to help the other. “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth” focuses on the members of a War and Peace reading group who are “building these little, yuck, networks for future success by hosting each other in their apartments around the city for the better part of a year under the pretext of discussing Russian literature.” A relationship in “Short Swoop, Long Line” seems to be going well until it goes off track when the man takes note of the bad behavior exhibited by the woman’s child.

Andrew Martin built his first novel, Early Work, out of young, directionless characters. Some of the stories collected in Cool for America were published before the novel, so it might not be suprising that they are cut from the same cloth.

Taken together, Martin’s stories make an argument for avoiding human contact (even before the pandemic gave us no choice) to avoid the kinds of complications that the characters endure or mishandle. The stories are dark, driven by characters who are largely aimless, but they have the virtue of honesty. There are no false promises here that life will get better. Yet there is always a sense that one day, the characters might grow up and find themselves. The characters know that the future is unknowable but they at least seem to have the sense that the future might hold something better if they can gain some wisdom and maturity instead of growing older without branching off from the same uncertain path.

RECOMMENDED