THIS SHORT NOVEL teeters between realism and parable.
Some small town churchgoers find the narrator asleep on a pew one Sunday and decide to take him--or her--in, temporarily, until they figure out where the stranger belongs. Pew, as they decide to call him or her, is of indeterminate gender and ethnicity and probably in their teens.
Pew does not answer any questions as to their name, sex, background, or anything else; they rarely speak at all, actually, save to a few people who themselves seem marginalized within the community.
A few days go by--the action of the novel covers exactly one week--and Pew is taken around to meet various townspeople. Lacey does an extraordinary job of conjuring up the ethos of the town in Pew's encounters with a variety of its citizens. Everyone wants to be charitable and welcome the stranger, but they also want to know exactly what kind of stranger they are welcoming. Then, too, there is something about Pew that compels them to open up a bit, to reveal more than they probably planned to reveal.
The undecidable aspects of Pew's identity start generating controversy, and some citizens grow belligerently insistent on getting answers to the questions about Pew's sexual, ethnic, and class identities.
The rising tension over who exactly Pew is coincides with the preparation for the town's annual Festival of Forgiveness, which will be held on Saturday. Lacey refrains from revealing exactly what happens at this festival while dropping dark hints--for instance, the townspeople want to squelch the rumor that it involves human sacrifice.
What it does involve, we learn, is the town's collective purging of its own hypocrisy, its own airing of the contradictions within its own supposed first principles, its confrontation with its own internalized lies. No one actually gets killed, but the scene of the festival in the final chapter does remind one a little of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," maybe a bit too of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" or (on a different cultural plane) Grace Metalious's Peyton Place or (on some other plane altogether) David Lynch's Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, or any depiction of the sinister capabilities that can lie just beneath the calm and idyllic surface of an American small town.
Pew gets out, as do a few other unassimilable types, thank goodness. Lacey's epigraph is from Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and we no more where Pew is headed than we know where those who walk away from Omelas are headed. One is relieved that they have gotten away, though, even if it turns out the next town down the road is just another Omelas.
