Pew by Catherine Lacey
In a small, devout village, an enigmatic stranger enters, sending the locals into a frenzy. A church congregation in the American South arrives for service and discovers a figure dozing off on a pew. He or she is racially and gender-neutrally ambiguous and silent. The unusual visitor is taken in by one family, who call them Pew.
Pew is moved from one residence to another during the weeklong Forgiveness Festival preparations throughout the community. Sincere and ostensibly well-intentioned local residents observe Pew’s dual identities and many open out to them in one-sided chats about their concerns and secrets. While having fleeting flashes of prior incarnations or hints as to their origin, Pew listens and observes.
Pew by Catherine Lacey
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As the days go by, the hole created by Pew’s absence starts to alarm the neighbourhood, whose kindness turns into dread and distrust. The secret of who they truly are—a devil or an angel or something entirely different—is overshadowed by even greater realities by the time Pew’s story comes to a stunning and terrifying conclusion at the Forgiveness Festival.
Pew, Catherine Lacey’s third book, is ominous, provoking, and enigmatic fable about the modern world, including its paradoxes, thin morals, and the limits of making assumptions about people based just on their appearance. One of our most cherished and boundary-pushing authors holds up a mirror to her characters’ inner identities while exercising accuracy and restraint, revealing something about forgiveness, perception, and the flawed framework society employs to classify human complexity.
Pew is a skillfully written tale about Jesus’s death that belongs to the classic Southern fiction form. Pew places an innocent individual in the centre of a community and gives the figure the ability to recognize the vacuousness and hypocrisy that support civilization, much to how Faulkner did in A Light in August or A Fable.
The embodiment that is a component of the human situation is the focus of Pew’s most important meditation. Due to their inability to name and subsequently own the body of the immigrant, a little Southern town is at a loss as to what to do with them. The title character, who is neither obviously male nor female, a person of colour or white, cannot be trusted since they lack the typical characteristics of the human condition.
There are very few sympathetic Southerners in the book, which seems to imply that the author believes physicality is the cause of our issues given how terribly those who are driven behave. And what region of this nation is more kin to its past than the American South? All of this culminates in a religious event where the locals admit they are unable to meet the spiritual requirements of the Christianity they claim to practice. Without giving away the conclusion, it also has a sacrifice at its core. the negative perception of the South, the hypocrisy of American Christianity, and the notion that we need to be freed from embodiment.
But I can see how skillfully the author crafted a plausible imagined universe, the significance and applicability of the subjects she examines, and even the suspense that keeps readers wanting to turn the pages. People who view things differently than I do will appreciate how these topics are conveyed in a potent tale. It may not be to their taste, but readers like myself can respect it as a magnificent work of art. Unsurprisingly, a novel by a seasoned author that is ambitious and artistically successful.
