Homeless and amnesiac narrator

One of Pew’s character remarked “ everything is just so strange lately” as Catherine Lacey has been spending the night in churches in the small towns of American south.

Vagabond sex and washing in a petrol station the narrator notes “where my legs met, there was something I knew to protect, though I could not say why.”

After sleeping in another church, our narrator is awakened by a Sunday morning worship service.

Pew doesn’t have a name, they’ve forgotten it. Pew doesn’t know if they’re a girl or a boy, a child or an almost-adult. Is Pew an orphan or something even worse, and what terrible trouble are they running from?

Concerned  for vagrant, an adjacent family asks the strange in town to lunch,  and when their visitor refuses to speak, the father christens their new ward after the seating along which they met: Pew.

The family installs Pew in the attic as a charity case assumed to be traumatised. The affected mutism drives everyone to distraction. The townspeople may be confused but  really to satisfy the raging curiosity of the visitor’s caretakers- the patient for undress for the nurse and slips out the emergency exit.

As days pass, their insistent clamour will build forma murmur to a roar, as both the innocent and the guilty come undone in the face of Pew’s silence.

Pew is beautifully written and concise.

 

Pew by Catherine Lacey , Granta £12.99, 224 pages.