You Should Read PEW
“We can’t live each other’s lives, and we can’t see each other’s memories or feelings, so we try to find ways to share them with each other” (61).
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My sister texted me a review of Pew when it came out back in Covid times, but I only picked it up recently. I’m not sure if it was the navy cover or the simple title that caught my eye as I scanned the shelves of used books at The Book Rack, but I walked out with Pew (and a few others) that day. Just as I waited to read Pew, I also waited to write this post. The book brought to mind a strange experience from college. One day I walked into my dorm room and stepped on a piece of paper that had been slipped under the door. I picked it up and read this directive: “If you’ve received this letter, you are a better Christian than the other girls on this floor, and we need to get together to pray for them.”
The letter was addressed to my roommate, not me.
Pew’s story of a stranger who is seen as inadequate by a hypocritical community placed me right back in that dorm. As the narrator reflects, “A town has a feeling . . . because certain kinds of thoughts are contagious” (203). A dorm has a feeling, too.
That unsettling jolt to my past stuck with me for days after reading this book. In a review, a writer I admire complained that Pew’s ending left her confused. I experienced a similar feeling in the final pages. Unsure what I was meant to understand differently by the end of the book, I posed myself the same questions I ask my students: What does the story reveal about human nature? What does the story suggest or challenge about our beliefs? Whose story isn’t heard, and what might they say if given a chance?
Pew’s unnamed and ungendered narrator is found sleeping on a church pew at the beginning of the book. The pew’s usual occupants, Steven and Hilda, take the stranger home and call them Pew. Steven and Hilda’s three boys don’t know what to make of their guest. When Pew follows the boys outside after dinner, Jack, the oldest, says, “He oughta be in the back in there, one of them that picks up the dishes . . . Everybody’s got a place” (17). Although Steven and Hilda enlist the entire community to figure out what to do with Pew, Jack’s early outburst sets the tone for the town’s response. They believe helping Pew is the right thing to do, but when Pew rebuffs their efforts and remains silent, the townspeople become agitated. They believe, as Jack does, that everyone has a designated role, and they lack the imagination or independence to accept someone who refuses to conform to roles their town has established. Pew reveals an unflattering truth about human nature: We seek order because it makes us feel comfortable, but the rules and expectations that create such order are arbitrary. Those who don’t fit the “place” we want for them are silenced.
Although Pew utters only three sentences aloud to others, readers are privy to their thoughts as the narrator. What Hilda and others view as passive obstinance, readers can discern as active resistance. At one point Hilda takes Pew to the hospital for an evaluation, hoping to uncover their gender. Pew does not get undressed. Their uncooperative behavior frustrates Hilda, who says, “I am patient, and I believe Jesus would be patient . . . but I am just about running out of patience” (94). Pew’s choice to remain dressed is not about Hilda at all, though. It’s a way for Pew to assert their agency. Pew reflects in the doctor’s office: “The question arose then–did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter? Why did they cause so much trouble for us? Why did we use them against one another?” (91). This internal monologue, which Pew repeats at various moments throughout the book, challenges a too-common belief that our bodies–our skin color, our embodied gender, our weight, our build–are our identity. Pew suggests our exteriors have meaning only because we give them meaning; the value we place on them is a weak human construction.
Like outward appearances, rituals are also contrived. During the week Pew spends in the town, citizens prepare for the Forgiveness Festival. The upcoming event sets everyone on edge. A neighbor confides to Pew that this “time of year . . . just makes [her] a little jittery” (54). The townspeople struggle to decide if Pew is welcome at the festival. By the end of the week, they decide Pew can attend. Police accompany the procession of churchgoers, all dressed in white. In the sanctuary, adults put on blindfolds. When a bell tolls, everyone begins speaking at once, confessing sins that range from mild guilt (“I don’t tithe as much)” to doubt (“not sure I believe in God”) to violence (“I hit her sometimes”) (199). At the second tolling of the bell, the confessions stop. People hold hands and repeat, “I forgive you.” The book’s motif of listening culminates in this scene. Throughout the book, townspeople confide in Pew. Although they dislike Pew’s secretiveness, they are able to share experiences and emotions with Pew. Pew, in their silence, listens; few in the town are capable of that skill themselves. The festival demonstrates they are only willing to listen when they don’t actually have to know the speaker. Pew, on the other hand, knows more about the townspeople than they do themselves.
As blindfolds are removed, the townspeople’s reactions vary. Some are relieved, some distraught, some overwhelmed. Pew exits the church and apparently disappears into the landscape. They think, “No one knows where I went, and I don’t know where I went . . . All of us are gone and were gone and have been gone forever” (206). This ending caused many a GoodReads post to end with some variety of “WTF.” I’m not sure I fully understand it myself. But having worked through the questions I’d ask my students, I am leaving Pew with this final understanding: Those whose voices we silence might tell us that our rituals (or laws, even) have outsized importance in our community. Rituals should not outweigh people. As a disillusioned community member tells Pew, “[The festival] is a ritual. We make them, people make them, and they don’t really mean anything, even the ones that supposedly mean something” (195). Sometimes, our good intentions to protect a community obscure harmful actions.
I wonder if the letter-writer in my dorm ever figured that out.
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Published: 2020
Timeline: one week
Length: 207 pages; audiobook runs 6.5 hours
Narrator: 1st POV, unnamed narrator
Pairs Well With: Women Talking by Miriam Toews; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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Pew chooses not to share any personal information with Hilda and Steve, the couple who take them in. Pew also doesn’t understand others’ insistence on knowing insignificant details like their name and gender. When the couple’s son lashes out at Pew, Pew turns inward: “I shut my eyes and imagined a life in which only our thoughts and intentions could be seen, where our bodies were not flesh but something else, something that was more than all this skin, this weight” (70-1).
When was there a time in your life where you felt your body or outer appearance got in the way of your relationships with others? Or did it somehow affect an outcome when it shouldn’t have?
Later, Pew meets with Roger, a self-appointed counselor for troubled youth. While Roger speaks, Pew reflects, “Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see” (108).
Although Pew says this about Roger, what other characters in the novel could it apply to? Who else do you think is hiding “something of them”? Alternatively, which voices seem most dangerous in this community?
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Lacey excels at creating totally original figurative language. Last week, I listened to Courtney Maum interview Marie-Heline Bertino about voice (if you don’t already subscribe to “Before and After the Book Deal” on Substack, here’s your reminder to do that right now!). Bertino spoke about how important it is for characters’ observations to be completely unique to them and their worldview. Pew’s status as outsider leads to strange metaphors and similes that do double work to not only depict the scene but also reveal more of Pew’s personality.
In the hospital, Pew sees “a man with hair and skin the color of a dead sky, his stomach and chest rounded out, like a whole small person sitting on his own lap” (83). The eerie “color of a dead sky” makes this image memorable and indicates that Pew’s perspective expands beyond the town. Pew frequently comments on or makes comparisons to the sky. When Hilda expresses uncertainty about how to help Pew, Pew notices that “[a]ll feeling left her face, like that final shift at the end of a sunrise” (80). After the Forgiveness Festival, Pew stands outside with a teenager named Annie. To capture the silence, Pew thinks, “Air sat between us like it will sit between anyone. The sky didn’t know one of us from the other” (206).
The cumulative effect of these sky-laced images and metaphors suggests Pew’s perspective expands beyond the town. While the townspeople focus on only what is in front of them (mainly, Pew rejecting their calls for assimilation), Pew sees past people and into the horizon. These metaphors build a somewhat unearthly voice, which makes it easier for readers to accept an ending where Pew melts into that very horizon.
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Creative Nonfiction: Hoping to unlock Pew’s identity, Roger asks Pew to draw what they are feeling. Pew draws a heron. When Roger struggles to interpret it, he tries to explain the purpose of the activity. He says, “We’re just trying to create an understanding–do you understand? That’s what people do. We can’t live each other’s lives, and we can’t see each other’s memories or feelings, so we try to find ways to share them with each other” (61).
What are you trying to do when you write? If you were to create a personal manifesto for yourself as a writer, what would it include? (For more ideas, see Jami Attenberg’s essay “Writing Compass” in her fabulous 1000 Words.)
Fiction: When Pew finds Kitty outside smoking, Kitty admits the upcoming Forgiveness Festival makes her jumpy. She says, “This time of year–it just makes me nervous, so I let myself have one in the morning and one after dinner just for the week before the festival. . . . It’s a good time of year, a beautiful time of year, but I don’t know–it just makes me a little jittery” (54).
Try writing this scene from Kitty’s point-of-view. What does she dread? What particular elements of the festival make her jittery? Or, if you want to step outside the book, take a character from your current work-in-progress and put them in a similar mood. Make them wary, anxious, distrustful. What is making them feel this way? Write a scene to find out.
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I am an unabashed lover of the em-dash. There is not an Emily Dickinson with too many dashes for me. In Pew, Lacey also uses dashes to great effect.
A dash can be used in place of a colon to introduce a list or independent clause. Check out these examples:
At the hospital, Pew wonders, “The question arose then–did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter?” (91)
Speaking to Pew, Mr. Kercher says, “They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion–wanting” (126).
In both instances, a colon could be substituted for the dash, but the dashes provide extra drama. I tell my students a dash is like a flashing arrow sign in Vegas–it says, “Pay attention! Everything to my right is important!” To continue my Vegas metaphor, a dash is like the emcee at a circus. In contrast, a colon is more subtle, more civilized. If a dash is a Cirque de Soleil ringleader, a colon is a penguin-tailed presenter at the Oscars.
But dashes do more than dramatically introduce lists or ideas. Dashes also indicate a break in thought. They occur frequently in the dialogue of Pew. Townspeople often seem uncertain what to make of their own life experiences as they confide in the silent Pew. Consider Roger’s description of attending a Quaker service and listening to a fellow attendee:
“And as she began to speak, I sensed the room was really listening to her, which was a little unusual–most people who spoke up did it too often, so no one ever really listened to anyone, but this woman–well, I felt I had never even seen her before, much less heard her speak” (40).
Here, Lacey uses dashes to show Roger interrupting himself. It’s as if he senses he may be judged for calling the woman “unusual,” so he backtracks after the first dash and adds context (“no one ever really listened to anyone”) to justify his response. By the end of his interruption, though, Roger realizes he doesn’t know how to classify this woman, so he hesitates again.
Similarly, Dr. Winslow hesitates when Pew refuses to undress. Lacey uses a dash she voices his character’s reaction:
“And we need to understand what sort of person you are–do you understand?” (89)
Throughout the novel, Lacey uses dashes to heighten the tensions and to reveal characters’ uncertainty. To what use could you put the dash to in your own writing? Put yourself in the middle of a thunderstorm (inside or outside, your call). Write a paragraph without dashes. Then try writing it again using dashes. What do you need to rearrange or change to incorporate them? How do they change the rhythm of your sentences? How do they drive the momentum of your paragraph?
