BOOK REVIEW: The Pesthouse

REVIEW
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THE PESTHOUSE, by Jim Crace; Nan A. Talese; 255 pages, $24.95.

'Pesthouse' rewrites history of Oregon Trail
Sunday, May 27, 2007

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

Portrait photo of author Jim Crace, courtesy of identitytheory.com.

Anyone who's ever heard of the American pioneers of the Oregon Trail -- or played one on a computer -- may do a double take during the first 20 pages of English novelist Jim Crace's "The Pesthouse." The rules of the game have been reversed.

In this vision of a future America, gutsy travelers leave their homesteads in the lawless, deserted West in hopes of sailing for greener pastures in Europe from harbors on the East Coast.

Crace disorients the reader with an almost perfect negative image, down to the faintly archaic voice and the details about caulking wagons and outlaw hordes on horses. He might as well be writing a pioneer story, but for the casually dropped references to antiques "old enough to have been machined" and small metal discs printed with the curious phrase "In God We Trust."
Image courtesy of oregon.gov

This is America several generations after it collapsed on itself. Crace admits readily that he was inspired by an impulse to tear down the world's biggest superpower and reverse its fortunes. Yet by the end of the book, "America" is not such a dirty word. The characters of "The Pesthouse" come full circle to realize the American dream; in Crace's version, that is a dream whose manifest destiny is entwined with the expansive landscape.

Curiously, Crace's method of approaching such grand themes is to focus on an awkward love story, adolescent in essence if not in the ages of the characters. "He was too young and inexperienced; she was too old and inexperienced," he writes of his protagonists, Franklin and Margaret.

As it turns out, capturing a wild, directionless America as a coming-of-age tale was a strangely appropriate authorial choice. If, in the beginning, Franklin and Margaret are trapped in perpetual childhood, they find the strength in the course of the book to form a real family and to realize their own dreams -- not those of their parents or peers, but their own.

The two happenstance lovers don't reinvent the wheel, but they do invent a rugged individualism not unfamiliar to aficionados of America's pioneer era.
American Gothic, by Grant Wood.

Crace's prose is clear-eyed and seamless, inhabiting the alternative world as a matter of course. He may be too good: Once you accept his vision of the world, the mechanics seem to spin out effortlessly. There is less a sense of grandeur than one might expect from this sort of sweeping narrative.

But even as you begin to feel that Crace's story has been "machined," the conflicted, layered performances of his leading lady and leading man -- inexperienced though they may be -- win the day.

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com


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