Jamestown : a novel /

AMERICANS have been very, very bad. Gluttonous, warmongering, nonenvironmentally conscious bad. In Matthew Sharpe's strange and strained "Jamestown," set in the post-apocalyptic future, everything is ruined, even the country, even the people. Brooklyn and Manhattan are fighting each other; the Indians have, inexplicably, retaken the South. The East River is goopy (or goopier). The Chrysler Building is rubble. Hares stalk the dead landscape biting off the heads of rodents. If Sharpe's book had come out in the '90s, Kevin Costner would be looking to direct. In this bad new world, the Manhattan Company is the government, dispatching a busload of men to get what its needs - oil, food, trees - from the Indians. The Manhattanites build a settlement, calling it Jamestown, after their boss. The Indians have corn. The settlers have guns. A lot of people die. Sharpe doesn't exactly take a gutsy approach to the old ideas. (Why is every imagined future post-apocalyptic, anyway?) War for oil = bad; corporations = eeeevil. And the white man? What a bunch of savages. Sharpe puts a black comedy spin on the story, but his jokes can feel more "funny" than funny. The Indian chief's adviser, Sidney Feingold, is also known as Sit Knee Find Gold. Murders that occur on the bus ride to Indian country must be approved by the board of directors. And one of the Manhattanites winds up walking around with an arrow through his skull, reminiscent of Steve Martin's favorite old head gear. Sometimes you can hear the ba-dump-bump-chchch. The character Pocahontas, however, is an original. Her braids look like dead animals and her voice is her own: "I want to write a fabulous description of the woods for you in the exciting language of English," she tells the reader. "There's a kind of moss that's soft and green and smells like the neck of my mom, who died when I was 1. I guess I'll call this moss mom's neck." Unlike the others, her character's a plump three dimensions. No wonder Johnny Rolfe, the Manhattan Company's communications officer, falls for her. The two text-message back and forth. Her handle is CornLuvr. He is GreasyBoy. Their banter is where the novel's charm lives. "Meet me tomorrow at tomorrow o'clock by the puddle," she writes. Outside of their romance, the book's a lot less spunky. Early on, Rolfe has a dream. In it a smiling dog gives birth to a string of blind, inchlong puppies through its penis. (Ah yes, the classic dogs-without-sight-entering-the-world-that-way dream.) Dreams in general tend to be problematic in novels. Because who here has ever been glad to hear the words "I had the weirdest dream last night"? In a novel, as in life, dreams are plotstoppers. "Tell a dream, lose a reader," the old saw warns. And the depth of character the dream is supposed to manufacture - like Cliffs Notes for the psyche - usually feels a little cheap. Rolfe's dream, though, isn't even that good. Maybe it's me, but I just couldn't figure out what that dog-and-penis show was all about. This experience happened again and again to me while reading the novel - not understanding what was going on, not grasping why the author had bothered to include some detail or character - and I began to suspect that Sharpe didn't know either. I came to regard him as a bit of a chatterbox. Sharpe writes at the end of the book that his story is a "fantasia" about the founding of Jamestown. Fine. But even a crazy story should make sense on its own terms. With some details, Sharpe went too far the other way. He chose as one of his central metaphors the bowel movement. The novel features all manner of droppings. We see characters relieving themselves, i.e. their pants are down, i.e. they're not looking too dignified. Gastro-intestinal tract issues are passed from the white man to the Indians. I'll spare you the sample quotations. Not that Sharpe isn't a good sentence writer. "The smoked air of the great hall by now had molassesed my brain." That's inventive enough to set off this computer's spellchecker. When Pocahontas sees one of Rolfe's comrades impaled and bleeding, she says, "I hear a wail where Ratcliffe is and turn to see the wail is colored red." And this: "I miss you," Pocahontas's second cousin tells her. "Miss you too," she says. "You know the girl who says she misses you is lying when she drops the 'I' and looks at the ground when she says it." "Ugh, can't a person accidentally drop a pronoun and then try to find it on the ground?" Sharpe's words are like well-trained soldiers going into battle for the wrong reasons. The talent is there, but the story is a less than worthy cause. Brooklyn and Manhattan are at war; the Indians have retaken the South. The East River is goopy (or, O.K., goopier). Susannah Meadows is a senior writer at Newsweek.

Known for his over-the-top tragicomic farces, Sharpe roguishly marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in a dialogue-rich hybrid of vandalized historical fiction and slapdash futuristic gloom. A busload of murderous yet oddly endearing lunkheads flee New York City as the Chrysler Building crashes to earth. They head to Virginia, hell-bent on setting up a new settlement and swindling the Indians out of food and oil. All the true-life Jamestown Johns are present: Smith, Martin, Ratcliffe, and Rolf, the expedition's communications specialist. Curiously, both morose Rolf and whip-smart Pocahontas are confiding their thoughts to wireless electronic devices and, therefore, serve as dueling narrators as Sharpe riffs outrageously on the oft-told tale of Pocahontas and the starving settlers, devilishly eviscerating our sense of the nation's genesis. Mixing slacker humor with ham-fisted vulgarity and precision-aimed barbs, Sharpe, an heir to John Barth and kin to David Foster Wallace and George Saunders, creates a caustic mix of old and new that proves the adage that as much as things change, they remain the same. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2007 Booklist

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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved