Jamestown Panned in the Times

Sam Tanenhaus hands Jamestown to Susannah Meadows for a review, and the results are not too good:

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 plot-stoppers. “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.

This strikes me as an odd criticism, as throughout Jamestown author Matt Sharpe finds numerous ways to characterize Johnny Rolfe--including dreams, Rorschach tests, internal monlogue, interactions with other characters, interactions with the environment, actions, lach thereof. The above mentioned dream is just a few paragraphs out of hundreds of pages in which Rolfe appears, but Meadows never tells us why it should take such a prominent place in her critique of Sharpe's characterization.

Moreover, I don't think Meadows's inability to understand Jamestown is adequate proof of the book's failings. In a similar way, I felt like I understood Jamestown very well and the book seemed very cohesive to me, but it would be lazy reviewing if I just wrote "Well, gee, this book just kept making so much sense, so it's really good and you all should read it." At the very least a reviewer needs to offer an argument as to why a book did or did not come together, but--other than the dream--Meadows doesn't even offer examples as to what in the book didn't make sense to her.

(As an aside, I've interviewed Sharpe about this book, and, based on his answers, I really doubt Meadows's assertions that he "didn't know" why he had "bothered to include some detail or character.")

Since Meadows is so lacking on concrete details, her review kind of hard to rebut. Basically all I can do is explain why the book works for me. So--in Jamestown I think Sharpe is working a few themes that intersect via the relationship of Pocahontas and Johnny Rolfe. The first theme is the way in which words are a faulty medium for comunication. This plays out in numerous ways--between Rolfe and Pocahontas, in the communications within the settler community, in the white/Indian communications. Intersecting this theme is something you migth call violence, or man's inhumanity to other men. Here Sharpe's doing a number of things, one of which is simply thinking through the acts and results of violence from a number of characters' perspectives. The commnication theme works in conjunction with the violence theme in obvious ways (miscommunication enables violence), but I also think Sharpe works in some more subtle ways here.

Taking these two themes as the main faultlines of the book, I was able to fit most of what I read into some general vision of the work as a whole.

One thing I particularly liked was how Sharpe found numerous different relationships in which to work these ideas--so we can see violence and miscommunication occuring in different (sometimes conflicting) ways throughout the book, oftentimes concurrently. In other words, Sharpe isn't just exploring these ideas in one sense--he's exploring them in multiple senses, and watching them compete on the page was, for me, a very rewarding experience.

Of course, all this is to say nothing of Sharpe's style, which would take another whole long post in itself. As Meadows alludes to, Sharpe is juxtaposing a number of different kinds of styles and time periods in his prose, combining historical fact (or "fact," if you prefer) with details entirely made up. Needless to say, I found this interesting as well, as I thought it was innovative to explore contemporary forms of communication (IMing, email, for example), while contemplaing often mythic parts of America's history.

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