BookLife Review: Pew, by Catherine Lacey
stranger, church community, American South, homeless, kindness, tolerance, difference
Pew, by Catherine Lacey, is an short but powerful examination of kindness and compassion for difference and otherness, and the countervailing pressures of intolerance and suspicion.
A gender and ethnically ambiguous mute stranger appears asleep in a pew in a church in the American South just as a community arrives for services. The novel is not about the stranger, but about the community’s complex relationship to the stranger. One family takes in the stranger and provides shelter. The community provides food and clothing. The stranger remains mute. As community prepares for its annual Forgiveness Festival, the stranger is moved from home to home. Tensions and suspicions rise as more community members are exposed to the stranger, and their otherness fails to conform to community norms.
Lacey artfully modulates the community’s response, cloaking it in the initial appearance of kindness and generosity. She pressure-tests the community’s tolerance, the depth of its stated commitment to kindness and slowly reveals cracks in the facade. When does kindness and generosity become a burden and an intrusion? Is the well of generosity of spirit limitless? Lacey’s placement of the drama and conflict squarely in a religious church community highlights the conflict. Is not “do unto others” a central tenet of the community? Is the tenet possessed of a conditional clause, “do unto others, if they are like you and conform to your likeness?”
People are imperfect, including people of faith. Pew examines the parameters and depth of our goodness and the extent of our selflessness in a compact, powerful, mildly fantastical story. The conflict comes to a dramatic and ironic conclusion at the community’s annual Forgiveness Festival.