#jimcrace

“Everybody died at night.”

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace is set in a post-apocalyptic America. We don’t know what happened, but Crace gives little details like toxic soil and ruined cities – enough that we know it is the future and that something has drastically changed.  He places America in a technology wasteland as if turning capitalism against us. The society that remains relies on solitary cities and homesteads almost as if he were writing a mediaeval future for our country. The driving force in this novel is another American ideal – Crace’s characters Franklin and Jackson Lopez are on a journey to the sea, a kind of reverse immigration to the better lands in Europe. (Ironic that their last name is Lopez? I think not.) When Franklin injures his knee, Jackson leaves him to make camp in the mountains above Ferrytown. While Jackson earns enough money to get them the rest of the way, Franklin meets Margaret. Margaret is ill with something called “the flux” and has had her head shaven to mark her as unclean. The two decide to travel back to Franklin’s homestead after a toxic gas bubble rises from the river and kills Jackson along with everyone in Ferrytown. The themes of immigration and isolation pop up repeatedly throughout their journey. The characters seem to never be satisfied with where they are – the journey to the sea is abandoned, their journey west is never begun – the story begins and ends with the pesthouse. Crace might have been trying to capture the American sense of adventure with this aspect.  

The language in this novel was more cumbersome than one would like in a fictional piece. Crace often fills the page with stilting sentences and long boxed off paragraphs. The narrator’s voice further drones on because of this. This narrator is always present and always acting like a filter for the action – digesting it before letting the reader know what is going on. The novel is written mostly in the past tense which I found a little distancing.  However, the language used reflects the dull, diseased landscape.  The language and form along with the book’s gray cover seem to capture a rather cliché drab apocalypse. Maybe it came off this way because Carace’s characters are so far removed from the cultural aspect of people – they cannot read and seem to have lost all connection to modern medicine and science –  that they simply cling to humanity with no knowledge of history or the past beyond their own families.  

Regardless of the reason, the language choice was a barrier that kept me from the novel. And as Francine Prose wrote for The New York Times book review section: “I’d wonder why American primitives should sound like refugees from a Thomas Hardy novel.”

Much like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the true evil seems to be other people (The Pesthouse couple also utilizes a shopping cart and encounter bandits); however, Crace’s epic seems to mirror American history and the bandits only try to make Franklin a slave rather than eat him.  In fact, it seems like Crace was trying to imitate McCarthy’s novel with his third person narrator and plot driven by the wondering characters. Where McCarthy’s story called attention to the beauty that is life with his father and son characters traveling an ash-covered landscape, Crace creates a diseased landscape that reflects America – obsession with religion, immigration, capitalism and an inherent urge to wonder crop up again and again in this book. Rather than taking a poetic approach like McCarthy, Crace utilized tropes to create a criticism of the American way of life.  

Although this novel was written by a British author, it did offer an interesting cast to American society. Crace incorporated various integral aspects of the American way of life – that when looked at critically are terrifying ideas –  to create the place and plot of this novel.  That aspect is what drew me to this book and what I think I want to incorporate into my thesis. My thesis incorporates autobiographical details as little flash prose pieces and I think it might be more interesting to weave these in as plot details in a way similar to how Crace uses this story to criticize America.

Going forward with this revision process, I think that I want to keep the segmented aspect that separates these flash prose pieces from the poems and memoir that make up the bulk of my work, and instead change how the narrative interacts with these pieces. I want to incorporate details that connect the two into the characters’ actions so that the flash pieces are more inter connected to the poems.  I am hoping this will lessen the separation between the two and allow the reader to have more of a memory reaction to the flash pieces.

Revisions after reading Pesthouse: