Another alien in our midst: Pew, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain. Step up Catherine Lacey, and welcome. Her previous novels specialised in confounding the reader, taking the frames of road trip and science fiction and giving them a good yank. Now she’s gone full religious allegory on us: or has she? ‘Pew’ is the name the villagers in her novel give to a stranger they find sleeping on a pew in the local church. Lacey’s character offers no name, no story, no age or gender (so let’s use the pronoun they; though I admit I kept thinking of Pew as male,
