From the incomparable Jim Crace, two-time winner of the Whitbread Prize and shortlist candidate for the Booker, comes his most accessible work to date. Rich in detail, sweeping in scope,
The Pesthouse is at once an intimate story of characters whose lives have been uprooted, and a gripping story of danger and misadventure.
From the Hardcover edition.A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2007
“The Pesthouse exudes a kind of eerie charm.” —Time Out
“A book that I read hungrily for what it might have to say about the fix we are all in on this planet. . . . Crace’s distinctive marked rhythms, just one draft away from blank verse, are at odds with satire. He can’t quite extinguish the joy that percolates through all his writing, and The Pesthouse ends up being a lovely literary cipher in the way that Crace’s work always is.” —Joan Thomas, The Globe and Mail
“Crace brings his unsentimental but unflagging imagination to the ruined landscape and battered scavenger societies of this new America. . . . He is especially good at documenting the bodily toll that unrelenting life on the road exacts. . . . Franklin’s and Margaret’s journey, as brutal and hopeless as it often seems, transforms into a kind of allegory for the human capacity for loyalty, love, humour and imagination.” —Toronto Star
“[Crace] takes us straight to the heart of what it means to be human. . . . He has always exhibited an uncanny gift for tapping into the horrors that wake us, heart pounding, in the middle of the night. . . . It’s a tribute to Crace’s skills that we so rapidly get our bearings in a radically altered landscape.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
“Crace has built a loyal following for the old-fashioned reason that he produces consistently dazzling work, matching sublime language with conceptual daring and an insistence on tackling the big themes head-on.” —The Gazette
“AS Byatt has described [Crace] as the most significant writer in English fiction of the past 10 years and in The Pesthouse he continues to build his self-contained worlds that, in mirroring our own in crucial, though subtle ways, offer up universal insights.” —Scotland on Sunday
“Entirely compelling. The story is a gripping, harrowing adventure tale and Crace’s language is extraordinary: he has immersed himself in his own kind of variant American idiom . . . which is simple, often beautiful, as touch and workable as leather. . . . The Pesthouse resonates like an unresolved chord.” —New Statesman
“While the plots and settings vary, Crace’s unerringly stunning style doesn’t. Even the most mundane of his characters beguile readers with their emotional authenticity and detailed psychologies. His prose carries the contours of a Donatello sculpture as Crace chisels gracefully flowing sentences with eloquence, precision and the occasional cheeky hint of the impish.” The San Francisco Chronicle
“At its heart, The Pesthouse is a meditation on deep questions about America: the costs of relentless expansion, the fate of a wasteful industrial society.” —Los Angeles Times
“Crace’s America lies not in the future but in our uneasy consciences. What’s remarkable is the fortitude, grace and patience he grants to the wary people who must make a life there, must remember and love, against all odds.” —Washington Post
“A writer of hallucinatory skill.”
—John Updike
“[Crace] has an almost uncanny ability to nail down a dramatic situation, and the characters to enact it, in one or two sentences. . .one of the best writers around.”
—Toronto Star
From the Hardcover edition.
Jim Crace is the author of several previous novels, which have been translated into fourteen languages. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and the GAP International Prize for Literature. He lives in Birmingham, England with his wife and two children.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Pesthouse begins with an idea many readers will find arresting, even shocking: American emigrants moving eastward, towards Europe. What does the book say about history?
I was hoping to investigate my own confused love-hate relationship with the United States, which – to grossly simplify – came down to enjoying and admiring most things American when I was in the country but distrusting all things American when they were exported and imposed. Novels are by nature mischievous and disruptive. And they can do what they want without drawing any real blood. So, by way of trying to articulate my confusion, I could simply reverse America’s position in the world and stick it at the bottom of the pile, give it a medieval future instead of one swaggering with wealth and technology and power. That was the starting point of The Pesthouse. I had no idea where it would lead me.
Technology has failed in the world you create. What does technology have to do with civilization?
Technology is the toolmaker. Tools protect us from many of the discomforts of the natural universe. There’s no denying that. They allow us to be less bestial. The Pesthouse removes tools from America, just to see how it would cope. What levels of civilization would survive? The good news is that – if this novel’s agenda is to be trusted – humankind’s civility is deeply imbedded and can survive the loss of almost anything, so long as there is love and rain.
Your fans will know not to expect a Hollywood ending to this book. How would you describe the ending (without giving it away)?
Well, it’s a curious love story with a happy ending, so you can’t get any more Hollywood than that. But Hollywood earns its optimism a bit too cheaply, in my view. My novels go into the darkest corners of existence to hear their brightest notes. I’ve always counted myself a deeply optimistic writer, though many of my readers have considered me irredeemably sombre. With The Pesthouse, however, the optimism is unmistakable. Although the American Dream is stripped naked by the novel, at the end of the story America is ready to recreate itself, to find its West again, to strike out for a territory which with any luck will be just as splendid and as lovable as the old America but not as overbearing.
From the Hardcover edition.
