Jim Crace is a writer of spectacular originality and a command of language that moves a reader effortlessly into the world of his imagination. In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love.
Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. The machines have stopped. The government has collapsed. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe.
Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.
The Pesthouse is Jim Crace’s most compelling novel to date. Rich in its understanding of America’s history and ethos, it is a paean to the human spirit.
"A writer of hallucinatory skill."
—John Updike
“Crace is one of Britain’s most remarkable writers.”
—Richard Eder, The New York Times
“One will watch with eagerness, and bated breath, the progress of this strong, inventive, and above all courageous novelist.”
—John Banville, The New York Review of Books
“[Crace] has always exhibited an uncanny gift for tapping into the horrors that wake us, heart pounding, in the middle of the night. He is fascinated by the extremes of existence, and he knows our demons by name…. It’s a tribute to Crace’s skill that we so rapidly get our bearings in [The Pesthouse’s] radically altered landscape…. Crace can write amazingly well…. When he’s on…he’s stellar.”
–Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
“[Crace’s] 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.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Jim Crace is a writer about plain things, but he writes about them in a way that’s both startling and subtle, a shimmering surface over still depths.”
–Washington Post Book World
"At one level, The Pesthouse is a suspenseful road novel...but at its heart, it is a meditation on deep questions about America: the costs of relentless expansion, the fate of a wasteful industrial society."
–Los Angeles Times
“The Pesthouse is a moving tale, a tour de force of imagination and ingenuity, written in a language that even the best poets would admire.”
–World Literature Today
“Tumescence, finely suggested in the author’s stately, faintly archaic prose, pulses this strange story and stops the heart as no consummation would…. Mr. Crace is the coldest of writers, and the tenderest.”
–Richard Eder, The New York Times
“Mr. Crace’s phantom America is a rich and strange creation.”
–The New York Sun
“A powerful but subtly rendered novel about the choices people make when there seem to be no choices…. Issues of family (blood or formed), religious faith, fate and the refusal to submit to it enrich an engrossing novel that may be the richest and most ambitious of the renowned author’s career.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“At its core, The Pesthouse is a love story, albeit one played out in a landscape of calamity. Indeed, in its own way, it is a tender book, quiet and interior, and exploration of the heart...”
–Bookforum
JIM CRACE is the author of eight previous novels. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.
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.
