Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #503123 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, April 2007: On the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, you won't want to confuse Matthew Sharpe's new novel by that name with the many commemorative histories that are coming out alongside it. In this gleefully anachronistic and deeply scatological tale, history repeats itself in a post-apocalyptic future that's as violent as the past. Sharpe connects many of the familiar historical dots (Pocahontas saves Captain John Smith and falls for John Rolfe, for example), but his settlers don't arrive from across the Atlantic in search of new land for tobacco: they flee a Manhattan where the Chrysler Building has just collapsed and the water is poison, driving an armored bus down the ruins of I-95 in search of the supplies of gas and clean food that they hope the territory of Virginia might provide. Amid the gore and smut, you'll find a surprisingly touching love story, starring a restless, de-Disneyed, and thoroughly charming Pocahontas, and thrillingly inventive language on every page that skims from Elizabethan archaism to IM slang and back, often in the same sentence. --Tom Nissley

Questions for Matthew Sharpe

Jamestown is Matthew Sharpe's fourth book (his previous novel, The Sleeping Father broke out into wide readership, thanks in part to a surprise Today show book club selection). We asked him a few questions about his latest work.

Amazon.com: What attracted you to the Jamestown story (aside, of course, from cashing in on the 400th anniversary)?

Sharpe: For a dozen years I worked as a writer in residence in New York City public schools for a nonprofit called Teachers & Writers Collaborative. In the late '90s a group of middle-school teachers in Queens asked me to help them develop some creative writing exercises for a unit they were about to teach on the Jamestown settlement of 1607 in Virginia. I read John Smith's several accounts of his sojourn there, made up some writing exercises, road-tested them, and liked the material so much I decided to do a big, novel-length writing exercise about it. I was drawn to the extremity of the story, the big personalities--Smith, Pocahontas, Powhatan--and, well, the awfulness of it. The story of Jamestown functions as one of the founding myths of our nation, and I wanted to highlight how America began in violence, bloodshed, and a level of incompetence that would be ridiculous had it not been so deadly; in other words, Jamestown was a lot like the administration of George W. Bush.

As for cashing in, I leave that to lottery winners and poker champions.

Amazon.com: You reveal how the former United States has come to this post-apocalyptic state of affairs in bits and pieces. Did you work that future history out for yourself beforehand, or did you just fill it in on the go, as needed?

Sharpe: I'm inclined to use the term post-annihilation rather than post-apocalyptic, since "apocalypse" implies revelation, i.e., the receiving of some crucial, maybe even divine knowledge. I don't see the people in my novel being the beneficiaries of that kind of knowledge, though some of them are struggling mightily to attain it. And I had a really good model for the post-annihilation future I depict, namely, the pre-annihilation present, presided over by the world's superpower-of-the-moment, us. As for working out my imaginary future beforehand or making it up as I went along: the latter, always the latter. The novel is an improvisation--a structured one, I hope, but the excitement (and terror) of writing fiction for me derives from the way I am always simultaneously playing the game and making up the game.

Amazon.com: How did you choose which elements from the original Jamestown story to include, and which to discard?

Sharpe: Mostly by intuition. I knew I wanted a cross-cultural love story and a cross-cultural horror story to co-exist: this would be the central tension of the novel, each would offset the other, or so I hoped. The primarily economic purpose of the original settlers also seemed important to include. The rest I used or invented as guided by presentiment. And, for better or worse, the things I say in interviews about the novel are mostly retroactive insights--hypotheses more than explanations. The person who wrote the book knows more about it than the person answering these questions does.

Amazon.com: Ben Marcus has written, "My feeling is that the impossible must be made viable, and only through language, that language is not subject to the laws of physics and therefore must not be restricted to conservative notions of 'sense' and 'nonsense,' but must pursue what appears impossible in order to discover the basic things." What's your take on that?

Sharpe: I like what Ben Marcus does with language in his own fiction and in his essays about other peoples'. I'd say one of the ways I tried to use language to depict the impossible in Jamestown was to represent the past, the present, and the future happening simultaneously. This happens at the level of content--people in a future America living one of America's originary historical events as if it had never happened before--and, I hope, it also happens at the level of style--people talking in English that is Shakespearean one moment, Keatsean the next, Otis Reddingesque the next, or all in the same sentence, or word.

Amazon.com: Jamestown is dedicated to Lore Segal, who is known in my house as the author of the fabulous kids' book, Tell Me a Mitzi, but who has had a long and varied career beyond that. What led you to honor her so?

Sharpe: Lore Segal is an excellent human being and was perhaps the most important writing teacher I had. I took a course with her at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan several years after graduating from college. It was all so dicey, "being a writer," it required an audacity I was attempting to muster. Lore's encouragement, her generosity, her good humor, her ability to help me figure out which parts of what I was doing were worth pursuing--these qualities of this wonderful woman helped me muster that audacity. She has a new book out called Shakespeare's Kitchen. Dear readers, if you have not already, please read the short story in there called "The Reverse Bug," and then, when you climb up off the floor, read the rest of the book.

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.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Ron Charles

You know that guy in ninth grade who was always reciting "Monty Python" skits to himself? Somewhere, in his parents' basement, he's now committing chapters of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown to memory. This hilarious, poignant and often annoying novel reimagines the first permanent English settlement in America as a modern-day dystopia, an absurd hybrid of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Walt Disney's "Pocahontas." Sharpe calls Jamestown "an ahistorical fantasia on a real event," which seems as good as any description we might devise for his psychedelic tribute to the 400th anniversary.

The more you know about the actual history, the more you'll be amused (or horrified) by Sharpe's weird transformations, but there's plenty of broad, scatological humor here even for those who couldn't find Virginia on a map. In Sharpe's zany version, the United States has collapsed, the environment is dead, and the survivors are starving. The ruler of Manhattan -- in the midst of a ruinous bombing campaign against Brooklyn -- sends a group of settlers (half of them "early-release convicts") down highway I-95 to Virginia to search for food and fuel on the Autobus Godspeed, a bulletproof vehicle that "differs from jail only insofar as it's more crowded and volatile, smells worse, and what surrounds it makes most of what goes on in jail look like a walk in a field of poppies."

The story comes to us through a series of short entries by different characters, such as the group's craven leader, John Ratcliffe; the indefatigable, often chained, frequently condemned-to-death Jack Smith; and even "A Couple of Fops" who are dying of their wounds. But the primary narrators are "the irreverent scamp" Pocahontas and the settlers' communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe. In real life, they eventually married and had a son. But here they fall in love at first sight, and their letters, e-mails, IMs and telepathic communications make up most of this story of disastrous cultural contact.

Despite the incongruous elements of modern technology, the old chestnuts of the Jamestown story are here: Pocahontas interrupting Smith's execution, a couple of horny settlers lured to their deaths by Indian girls, and negotiations collapsing into deadly skirmishes again and again. But it's all run through the meat grinder of Sharpe's freaky sense of humor. He plays with the names like a naughty, brilliant child: "Rat Cliff," "Poke-a-huntress," "Jacks Myth." Native American customs and language are subjected to the kind of politically incorrect comedy that could get a writer who cared burned at the stake. Pocahontas is a linguistic acrobat whose feminist wit skewers Indian pretensions as readily as it punctures Anglo cliches. Watching one of her friends prepare for the hunt, she writes, "If a man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, [he] would resemble that man." Later, spotting the settlers' bus, "I tiptoed, real quiet, Indian style, through tall corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones."

But the settlers come off far, far worse. Beneath a torrent of sophomoric vomit jokes, sex jokes and fart jokes, Jamestown is an anguished lament for the whole bloody history of Western conquest, the stupidity and cruelty of invaders then and now. Back in Manhattan, their crime boss, Jim Stuart (think King James of the house of Stuart), lays waste to the city and tortures his mistress with bad erotic haiku after sex. One of the most vicious (and therefore successful) settlers survives having his legs hacked off and an arrow shot through his head, which he keeps there, à la Steve Martin, while being carried around through the rest of the novel by two muscle-bound bodyguards in their underwear.

Sharpe's wit relies primarily on the juxtaposition of profundity and silliness, tragedy and absurdity, a kind of Catch-22 about the 17th century for the 21st century. Jamestown is packed with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative, but Sharpe is determined to cram the pages with allusions and fragmented quotations till you feel like you're stuck in an elevator with Dennis Miller: Here's Plato, Tennyson, Beethoven, Whitman, Kant, Shakespeare, Wang Yang-ming, William Morris, Otis Redding, Judy Garland, even Gary Coleman -- it's enough to make you stop googling and cry "Okay! Okay! You're the cleverest writer in the universe, but just stop it, for God's sakes!"

Needless to say, a little of this goes a long way, but Sharpe is a consistently surprising writer, who puts as many crazy demands on the English language as it's ever endured. Like those original profiteers and thieves, if you venture into Jamestown, you'll find more than you could have imagined -- some of it inane, some of it wonderful. Beware and Godspeed.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

over the top and back to the future
In order to appreciate this book, you have to get over the idea that it's either "about" the present or the past. It's what Sharpe calls an "ahistorical fantasia": he puts not only the Jamestown story but bits of Shakespeare, blackface minstrelsy, Disney's Pocahontas, sketch comedy routines, Wallace Stevens poems, a bunch of flatulence jokes, and other bits of detritus into a blender and then serves up the mix in a weird, "Children of Men"-like futuristic context. It's WAY over the top -- but if you like to laugh while your head is spinning around, this may be the one for you.

Tour de Tour de Force
The "Today" show and Anne Tyler's praise first brought my attention to Matthew Sharpe. I bought "The Sleeping Father," his last novel, and was completely floored--a satirical and wry comment on American life that at it heart still has heart, such a rare artistic achievement. So I'll admit, I was predisposed to enjoy whatever came next. Jamestown is more than I could have hoped for. The first thing I love about it--something I love about all great works of literature--is that you have a difficult time describing it. I want to say it's a road book, a little like Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," in that respect. But it's so much more. On the surface, it takes us into the future, at a point when Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America. A company of men is dispatched to Jamestown, Virginia, where they come in contact with the local tribe of Native Americans, about whom I can say no more without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that in an acid rain world of polluted waters, poisonous air, and species evolution gone wild, the "Indians" seems to have learned how to survive. Jamestown has love stories, war stories, and an underlying analysis of humans in struggles for power. As far as women go, the teenage Pocahontas, diary writing to the world on wireless, is a character that, if I have it right, will go down in literary history: she is a joy to be with, a page-turning treat. The book has so many levels that I don't even know how to communicate them--Sharpe writes sentences that almost comment on themselves but never end up being anything less than lyrical and just beautiful. Jamestown is about America, war, and ultimately about love. It's beautifully crafted and, despite its intellectual and analytical heft that hits you when its all over, it reads like a thriller, each small chapter racing you ahead on the road into that runs simultaneously into the past and the future of America. I'm probably not being clear, so let me say this about it before I wrap up: amazing! I just have one question about the book, and that is: why isn't everyone reading Jamestown? Right now?

old weird America
Matthew Sharpe's America here is the America of Blood Meridian, a childlike, exuberant, and reflexively violent America. The writing is simultaneously coarse and refined, broad in its obsessions, but cutting and precise in its arch vocabulary. It also keeps its sense of humor all the way through. As absurdist and outlandish as this post-Apocalyptic mashup is, it remains true to the metaphors of the Jamestown settlement. The characters are well-delineated, and it's easy to relate to both the "native" populations and the interlopers as they struggle with cross-cultural communication, one's responsibilities to one's society, and what it's like to fall for a stranger who can scarcely conceive of your roots. John Rolfe's stoned reading of a Rorschach inkblot is a tour de force, moving deftly from the scatological to the heartbreaking, all the while hewing to the novel's own self-made mythos. Sharpe is conscientious about paying off his enigmas, like the red skin of the tribesman, their ability to speak English, and the nature of the war between Manhattan and Brooklyn. He's also good about slipping in historical and cultural nuggets, both ancient and modern. My only issue was with the obvious difficulty of sustaining such an over-the-top narrative. The relentlessness did get to be a little wearing on the backside of the arc.