ARTS . Book Review

Rediscovered Country

Jamestown, by Matthew Sharpe


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Published: Mar 20, 2007

Jamestown

By Matthew Sharpe
Soft Skull, 336 pp., $25

Jamestown really begins to come together only when John Rolfe and Pocahontas stop texting each other and start communicating through telepathy. This happens some two-thirds of the way through Matthew Sharpe's book, well after his band of hapless settlers watch the Chrysler Building topple as they flee Manhattan in a halftrack armored bus. After, also, the New Yorkers parley and skirmish with red Virginians and half-build a fort in a swamp. Somewhere in there, Pocahontas stays John Smith's execution with her body.

Not that, by any stretch, Sharpe is trying to write historical fantasy, or apocalyptic science fiction, or craft a Turtledove-y alternate America. If Jamestown is any one thing, it's probably satire, but Sharpe hardly maintains a single focus or tone long enough for that. Instead, he delivers a torrent of brilliant and flashy words and perspectives. This is a virtuoso performance by an incredibly talented writer, like Eddie Van Halen soloing in the middle of one of those boring narrative Gordon Lightfoot songs about sad people in cold places.

Most of us know the outlines of the "real" Jamestown story from elementary school lessons or Disney cartoons, but Sharpe's transposition of events rewards knowledge. There's not just the central scene of Smith's salvation — we also get his imprisonment on the voyage rendered as alcohol-fueled bondage play, and Newport's resupply voyages played for farce.

But Sharpe cuts loose on the details. The difficulties of language between settler and native lead to low humor (Poke-a-huntress, Jacks Myth). The welter of first-person voices Sharpe uses leads to strange juxtapositions, like the disembodied conversation of "A Couple of Fops" delivering a Beckettish dialogue while dying. With the near-future setting, Sharpe even allows himself to toss in the junk culture of the last four centuries: His characters quote Diff'rent Strokes and the Velvet Underground alongside Shakespeare.

With all this bravura, Sharpe departs sharply from what he's done in the past. His last book, The Sleeping Father, was minutely realistic suburban melancholy, and completely wonderful. More importantly, it was grounded in a way this book isn't, with a fully imagined, if not completely explained, world. Jamestown is a sharp, bright mess, scattering hints about fear-mongering politics and eco-armageddon; for all of its sparkling surface, though, those hints never solidify into a comprehensible statement.

Matthew Sharpe will read Wed., March 28, 7 p.m., Robin's Books, 108 S. 13th St., 215-735-9600, www.robinsbookstore.com.