CATHERINE LACEY
Photo by Willy Soma
Catherine Lacey’s writing explores the messy nuances of inner realms and outside forces. Author of the novels Nobody is Ever Missing and The Answers, she’s also published Certain American States, a short story collection. In this interview, she discusses her latest novel, Pew, an unsettling exploration of identity, religion, and social group dynamics.
Interview by Tyler Nesler
What struck me right away with the character Pew is that I perceived them as being in a state of psychological dissociation. It's as if they are drifting through life in a fugue state. Pew sometimes experiences curiosity about having no concrete sense of history or identity, but why do you think they are so seemingly calm and accepting of their current condition?
The human being at the center of the narrative, the person who is called Pew, they don’t have to accept or rebel against their predicament, I imagine, because they have no sense that they have a predicament. However, I am not the sort of writer who thinks of her characters as actual people. I don’t write fiction to have friends, nor to create a simulacrum of my life or the lives of others, but rather to set up spaces in which to think. Of course some degree of reflection of the world around me happens naturally, but of course that’s impossible with the person at the center of this book, as no such person can exist and therefore they’re even less controlled by the sort of emotions or rationales that you and I respond to every day.
Pew does inhabit a zone of constant immediacy that is in some ways enviable. We're always told to "be in the moment," but of course the mind constantly wanders to the past and future and to fears and desires. Pew's mind does sometimes drift to fragmented memories, but there doesn't ever seem to be any attachment to them. What were some narrative or character challenges in maintaining this sense of dispassion when Pew recounts scraps of memories or events?
Oh, there were plenty. In some readers eyes I have surely failed and that’s fine; that’s to be expected. At one point in my life I used to meditate regularly with a rather large group of people. Some of them I knew, some I did not, and I had a sense that even though we were all having vastly different experiences as we sat, the nothing that we sat with was the same nothingness. There is no custom nothingness.
Pew, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
A classic creative writing guidance is "what does this character want?" Pew doesn't seem to have much desire for anything aside from reliable shelter to sleep, though at times Pew does want to leave the religious community into which they have been ensnared. But overall Pew seems to possess no greater ambitions. Was it difficult to craft a character without any of the usual overriding ambitions, passions, or desires, while keeping them intriguing on their own terms?
I have never really understood nor abided by this law of a character’s Wants. Most of my fiction follows people who are confused about what they want. I don’t think I know how to write anything else.
I also saw a distinct body dread or dysmorphia with Pew — "Anything I remember being told about my body contradicts something else I’ve been told. I look at my skin and I cannot say what shade it is. I look into a mirror and see nothing in particular. It seems I am sitting somewhere within all this skin and muscle and bone and fat and hair."
Pew also considers the body's inevitable betrayal through decline. Could you speculate as to why Pew doesn't seem to want to change or even discard their body? Even with the dread, they seem fundamentally accepting of their imperfect corporeal state.
Dysmorphia as a concept has become closely associated with anorexic white women believing themselves to be fat, but I think dysmorphia is a much more widespread, various, and tenacious aspect of the society of spectacle that we currently live in. Our mind is so overtaken by digital images that we are confusing our private sense of the physical, the actual.
Even with an indefinite body and identity, Pew is emphatic about being human: "All I could have told the Reverend, if I could have spoken, was that I was human, only missing a few things he seemed to think I needed — a past, a memory of a past, an origin."
What do you think it is that makes Pew so strongly identify as human despite the lack of cultural markers that many view as essential to a human identity? In many ways it's as if Pew knows themselves on a deeper, more authentic level than anyone else in the novel, but where do you think this originates?
But isn’t that the truth about being human? We all know ourselves so much more intimately and totally than another person ever can and yet when we look outward at others, we confine people by our minuscule understanding of them. Pew insists they are human because I insist, as the author of the book, that they are human and I insist that because that’s what I wanted the book to explore — to what end do we use identifying features of a person to compact their humanity? I don’t think a person needs a body that I comprehend and catalog in order for their humanity to be equal to mine, and yet convention tells us otherwise.
The question of whether to be human even requires an actual human body is explored through Nelson's surreal dream of a woman who scientifically transforms herself into a horse. Then Pew is left "wondering why it was that anyone believed the human body needed to be a particular way, or what was so important about a human body? Was it possible for a human's mind and history and memory and ideas to live inside the body of a horse, and if it was, did that make the being a human or a horse? What difference did it make, one life to another?" Would you say that this perception isn't necessarily "posthuman" but rather more of a type of transhumanism?
I’m really not sure. That dream in the book, the one that Nelson has, is one that I had as I was thinking and reading about the lives of animals and deciding that I had to be a vegan. The supposed love people have for their dogs and cats while casually and unthinkingly supporting widespread animal abuse is really a wild thing.
The first person perspective in the book is unique in that it contains some omniscient qualities that are usually more associated with writing in the third person. Pew is aware that they can easily see more deeply into people than most others can. Pew says that "I don't know how it is I can sometimes see all these things in people — these silent things in people...so often it feels like an affliction."
Pew seems egoless in the sense that there is no desire to capitalize on this ability. Instead they view it more as a liability. I perceived this as an unusual combination of wisdom and naivete to Pew — was this a tricky tightrope to balance when developing this character? They could have easily transformed into a kind of otherworldly or transcendent being, whereas Pew solely wants to be viewed as human.
The voice was absolutely a challenge for me, but in the end the voice is subordinate to the ideas of the book, which I know makes for a trickier reading experience. I have a weakness, as a writer and a reader, for voices that are deranged, flawed, complex, and a bit perverted but I have my whole life to write characters like that. At the time I wrote Pew I wanted to reach something quieter and more elemental.
The character Roger's recollection of his time in a Quaker community emphasizes the value of silence compared to the way that talking is so often misinterpreted by others, and especially by groups. Pew's silence is very unnerving for many of the characters, however Pew does furtively speak to some of them. What do you think the qualities of some of these characters are that makes Pew comfortable vocalizing to them?
I’m not sure if the characters themselves have qualities that Pew perceives so much as there are moments between people, that allow a person to transcend preexisting limits. I know I’ve felt things like that — both good and bad. Once on the subway I yelled at a man who had yelled at me, though I had never had the nerve to do such a thing before or since. Then there other days when maybe you feel very inward and disconnected but there’s something about the light in a grocery store and the lilt in the cashier’s voice and all of a sudden you’re having this very connected, tender conversation with someone you don’t know. Every experience has the input of the people involved, but also dozens of others seen and unseen forces.
The previous question also ties into the way that some of the characters don't know how Pew fits into a "tribe" or a fixed identity or gender or race, and this deeply unnerves them. However, some characters (such as Nelson, the gas station lady, Randall, Annie) readily find a kind of personal affinity with Pew. Why do you think these characters are so immediately at ease with Pew compared to many of the others?
Outsiders recognize outsiders. I think it’s really as simple as that.
A Christian brand of forgiveness is a major theme in the book, which culminates in the religious community's Forgiveness Festival. But the Festival itself seems to act more as a way to blur individual identities into something more collective and less binding. Pew briefly encounters a perplexed Annie there and thinks, "...This Annie who answers to Annie but who has another, truer name — I knew she was not lost to the world just because she was lost to this place."
Could this be the true function of the Festival, as a means to briefly release the group from locked-in identities? Could it be more about forgiving the self of its attachments to place and identity and desires, much in the same manner that Pew already seems to exist day-to-day?
I think there is a very strong hunger for absolution in the American psyche right now. Maybe it’s always been there — I don’t know, I’ve only been here 35 years. But it seems particular to now, and it seems that when one says they want forgiveness what they want is the absolution of becoming blameless, of the erasure of history, of context. Though I wasn’t thinking of it in these terms, it might be that the American attempts at absolution from our history are a kind of continuous forgiveness festival — a blind, false thing.
Buy Pew
Read our 2019 interview with Catherine about her short story collection, Certain American States
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Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.
