Pew by Catherine Lacey
Published 2020 · 224 pages · 61,600 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor
How hard is Pew to read?
Pew scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Lacey uses plain, flat diction in Pew's quiet first-person voice, with no ornament or specialist terms. The register sits near The Remains of the Day in formality but is simpler and more contemporary.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Sentences run measured and declarative, with occasional long listing passages as townspeople confess. Nothing demands the nested parsing of Faulkner or James.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The setting is concrete, with a church, a kitchen and a festival, but the book works as a parable about identity, belief and projection. That puts it between The Road and The Remains of the Day.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- At roughly 62,000 words, the book moves slowly, with spare events and long stretches of monologue. Little new information arrives per page.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Pew never states what they are or where they came from, and readers must infer meaning from what the townspeople say and from what is left out. The parable form pushes the book beyond Gatsby's inference level.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The pew, the blank protagonist and the Forgiveness Festival all carry allegorical weight. The signposting is clear, closer to 1984 than to Moby-Dick.
- Ironic distance: 62 out of 100
- Lacey's deadpan voice records small-town piety and its cruelty without comment, leaving the gap between what Pew hears and what it means for the reader to close. It runs drier and quieter than Gatsby.
- Resolution withholding: 72 out of 100
- Pew's identity and origin are never revealed, and the ending stays open and abrupt. The book resists closure more than The Great Gatsby does.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- The book follows a simple linear sequence of days in the town, building toward the festival. Its form is plain compared with fragmentary novels.
How Pew is regarded
Pew holds a literary regard score of 41 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.