Pitched somewhere between Shirley Jackson’s creepy small-town horror and the seminar-room riddling of JM Coetzee, Catherine Lacey’s powerful new novel unfolds in a sinister US Bible belt community shaken by the arrival of a mute amnesiac vagrant whose age, sex and race aren’t clear. “I’m having trouble lately with remembering,” the narrator tells us on the first page – something of an understatement, it turns out.
Taken variously as a child or young adult, he or she (the novel is agnostic about the value of such labels) is found asleep in a church, unwilling or unable to answer questions about how they ended up there. Given shelter by a family of five – and named, like a dog, after the place it was found – the new lodger soon causes resentment among the children displaced as a consequence. “He oughta be in the back in there, one of them that picks up the dishes,” one son says, giving up his attic room. “It ain’t no boy,” says another: “She ain’t even black neither. Don’t know what she is...”
“Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told,” Pew tells us. While rumour spreads that this mysteriously silent incomer must have suffered terribly, the community’s patience proves finite, not least in the case of a local bigwig who calls a public meeting over Pew’s refusal to undress for a medical examination ordered to settle the question of whether “God [made] you a boy or a girl”, as a clergyman puts it.
The novel’s glassy cadences and lack of speech marks heighten our sense of the narrator’s alienation; anything said to Pew appears in italics, as if filtered from an outside world. All the while, the clock ticks as the story takes place over a week leading up to an ominous-sounding festival for which Pew is advised to prepare (there are dark hints that it involves human sacrifice). Added unease comes from news reports of civil unrest across a county border, where marchers are protesting against a spate of disappearances. Menace lies, above all, in the feeling the community won’t tolerate the challenge of Pew’s ethnically ambiguous androgyny to its conservative Christianity.
A protagonist wiped clean of memory is something of a challenge for a writer, too. It’s not entirely convincing when, prior to the festival, Pew tells us that the town’s streets “somehow... had that feeling, that holiday feeling – and I wasn’t sure how I knew this feeling but I did know it”. If the almost unbearable tension more than makes up for the odd misstep, you have to accept a certain solemnity as the price of entry. It’s typical when Pew qualifies a remark by telling us: “it only seemed that way to me and I am only one person, ruined by what I have and have not done”. Sometimes the narrator’s emptiness seems a convenient vessel for Lacey’s tendency, shown in her previous novel, The Answers, to drift into dreamy rhetorical questions: “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?”
By coincidence, I happened to read Pew alongside Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, which also casts doubt on the wisdom of setting too much store by crude notions of identity, albeit more bluntly. Wrestling more creatively with dilemmas of selfhood, Lacey avoids everyday considerations, which here interest only the narrow-minded townspeople out to have Pew pinned down (or worse) for the sake of what one of them calls “legitimate concerns”. “You might know that some people these days like to think a person gets to decide whether they are a boy or a girl,” someone tells Pew. “If I could have spoken,” Pew tells us, “I could have [answered] that I was human, only missing... a past, a memory of my past, an origin.” Live and let live, in other words – but, as this rich, enigmatic novel reminds us, it’s rarely that simple.
• Pew by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
