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Recommended Reading: 'Jamestown'
April 4, 2007
How I loved this book. Warts and all. And it's got a few warts -- not the least of which is that Matthew Sharpe expects more from a reader than the average fiction writer does, meaning that mere page-turning will not be rewarded.
Thank God.
Here's our PW review of
Jamestown; my own comments follow:
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A wonderfully warped piece of American deadpan, Sharpe's retelling of the Jamestown settlement has the settlers arriving in the Virginia swamp on a bus from Manhattan. There are numerous hints that civilization has taken some devastating hit, leaving Manhattan without oil or untainted food and engaged in a long war with Brooklyn. Hence, the venture into the wilds of the Southern states. The settlers are led by John Ratliff, whose mother's boyfriend is the CEO of Manhattan Company. The Indians, who speak English (a fact they try to dissemble), owe their "reddish" hue to their use of sunblock SPF 90. They're led by Powhatan and advised by Sidney Feingold—and they lack guns. The story follows the traditional romantic arc, as Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, falls in love with one of the settlers, the lank, sallow, greasy-haired communications officer, Johnny Rolfe, and saves the life of another, Jack Smith. The narrative alternates first-person accounts, allowing Sharpe (The Sleeping Father) to weave his preternatural sense of parody into an increasingly dire story of killings and kidnappings. The chapters narrated by Pocahontas are virtuoso exercises in language, as MySpace lingo metamorphoses into Jacobin rhetoric, blackface dialect and back again. This is a tour-de-force of black humor. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Bethanne here, again: I expected something akin to the magical realism that results from Sharpe's juxtaposition of 17th-century tropes (discovery of a colony, indigenous peoples, and so forth) with 21st-century perspectives (a post-feminist Pocahantas, multisexual immigrant convicts from New York); I expected mordant linguistic wit (this is from Soft Skull Press, after all); I expected a bit of slapstick (this is Matthew Sharpe, after all; The Sleeping Father included more than a bit of it).
What I didn't expect: two protagonists whom I adore. Sharpe's John Rolfe and Pocahantas (often referred to as "Poke-a-huntress," which is riffed on endlessly due to her obsession with getting laid) exist warts and all. He has hideously greasy hair, she has braids that he compares to rodents and is not the lissome looker of Disney animation. As Rolfe and his fellow travelers on the Autobus Godspeed attempt to find food and fuel in the Virginian hinterlands, the lust story that develops between him and Pocahantas gains momentum. More important, it gains humanity. Pocahantas is neither fish nor fowl nor good redskin archetype; she's curious, engaged, smart, and real. Rolfe -- seen by his comrades as someone unusually empathic -- is by turns confused and proactive. But the real fun is that we don't just hear from them. Chapters are narrated by all manner of chracters, including Chief Powhatan's M.D. Sidney Feingold and "Jack" Smith, feisty and ruminative leader of the escaped-convict pack.
Another review of
Jamestown that I particularly enjoyed is
this one by Ron Charles of The Washington Post Book World.
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on April 4, 2007 | Comments (5)
