You Should Read PEW by Catherine Lacey
Raise your hand if you've been personally victimized by Regina George (or anyone else, for that matter).
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.
Lacey’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 figured that out.
Check out the full (and FREE) post at The Readerly Writer.