The Pesthouse

Jim Crace's latest novel is poorly written. Generic and meager as that criticism sounds, especially when it regards a novelist who comes so highly praised as Crace, it's true—it's by design. The Pesthouse is something of a science-fiction novel (quoting myself here):

Disturbed by the long national nightmare of the Bush administration, the English novelist turns on the American dream itself: Following an apocalyptic collapse staged generations into the future—in which the United States has descended into a pre-modern dark age—emigrants flee the West by mule and wagon in a journey across the Mississippi to the East. There, they line up for a ticket to the land of opportunity: Europe. Crace's reverse Oregon Trail is marked by a spoiled breadbasket, ruthless lawlessness, and worse still, a terrible plague (the "flux") that ravages the last populated bastions of the City Upon a Hill.

To tell this story, Crace adopts a mimetic strategy. He writes in strictly tempered tones, dressing the medium itself to match the thing he's representing in the narrative. The story's premised on a pre-industrial, superstitious, traditionalist, anarchist society—so, accordingly, Crace's prose is nasty, brutish, and short.

The writing in The Pesthouse is in fact folksy, characterized by simple sentences and elementary diction. But it's not ironical or tart, the way you might expect a stylized future apocalypse tale to be. Instead, the narrator comes across as naive—in fact, as naive as his lead characters, Franklin and Margaret, whom the reader meets on their punishing trek east. (No worry, no spoilers here.) Throughout the story, the value of his protagonists is strictly symbolic. Like characters in a parable, they are levers, simple machines used to accomplish the elements of the story. The narrator's relation to the story, however, is tangled.

Good science fiction stories are legends; and a reader expects the narrator of a legend to be a tribesman, a fellow, someone who is sympathetic to the text or, at the very least, shares the epistemic situation of the readers. (As opposed to being in the same condition as the hero, for example.) Folk literature is diagetic (in that the narrator tells the story rather than reveals it). Crace's narrator, however, doesn't tell it straight. An example from early in the story, just after Franklin meets Margaret (she is sick, he is carrying her):

Were they in love? Well, no, not yet. He was too young and inexperienced; she was too old an inexperienced. They were, though, getting there with every step. And they were as intimate as lovers. How could they not be, with her legs pushed open, wrapped around his back, her breath and lips against his nape, her arms embracing him, clasped across his breastbone, so that, she thought illogically, she could help him bear her own weight and share the weight of worrying?

[ . . . ]

. . . [Franklin] was determined not to show any weakness or tiredness. Here was his chance to prove to her how useful he might be and how mature. What luck had put this woman on his back? His damaged knee had proved to be an unexpected blessing.

Crace's stilted, superficial delivery continues apace, mirroring the blank characters in the story. It's a textually mimetic device: The narration is built to resemble a mythic journey, an epic text. Crace's post-history is practically pre-novel.

But without the benefit of an emulsifying agent (like irony), Crace's stylistic ingredients don't take. Dialog is rare in The Pesthouse and instrumental at best; the reader is granted selective insight into the protagonists' minds, but they are blank as slate. And even that fails to say something compelling or biting about America.

Had the story been told from a strictly objective lens, Crace might have pulled off his faux-naif tale. Certainly, the novel would have benefited from the kind of affection that sci-fi authors typically devote to description. The narrator has no better knowledge of science, medicine, etc., than the characters, leaving the reader with dull explanations for catastrophes—the land is toxic, full stop, and no opportunity is afforded to investigate this state in a way that might give the reader some clue as to why or how.

Such an extravagant and ultimately fruitless approach to a story that ought to have been delicious. Where were the everyday artifacts, the everyday things lost on the characters but token to us? Or frightening cave bears? Not even a Statue of Liberty, half sunk, visage shattered, where nothing beside remains. The pure pleasure elements are missing in The Pesthouse because Crace didn't take pleasure in writing it.

Posted by Kriston at May 15, 2007 10:31 PM