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The Pesthouse
A Novel
by Jim Crace
Whitbread-winner Crace ("Quarantine") imagines a future post-apocalyptic America in which society has collapsed and its inhabitants scratch out a meager living by any primitive means necessary. The only reasonable hope for survival is a difficult trip east through the environmentally devastated land and passage by ship to Europe.
Nan A. Talese, 272 pages
05/01/2007
$24.95
ISBN: 0385520751
Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Library Journal Jim Coan
[Crace] manages to give depth and complexity to characters in a post-literate society who are practically nonverbal. [1 Mar 2007, p.69]
Kirkus Reviews
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. [1 Feb 2007, p.89]
San Francisco Chronicle Mark S. Luce
McCarthy ["The Road"] may have cornered the market on blood-red prose that captures postapocalyptic violence and horror, but Crace provides an equally intriguing vision that seems less frenzied but not too sanguine.
Chicago Sun-Times John Barron
Equal parts allegory, adventure story and rich meditation on existence, The Pesthouse imagines a place on the Dream Highway where the best in human nature always has a path. For that it serves as perfect complement -- and tonic -- to [McCarthy's] "The Road."
The Spectator Simon Baker
The Pesthouse finds the author not just on his own best form, but arguably on the best form any English writer has shown in the last couple of years. What impresses most, in this beautifully written novel, is the way that Crace makes the reader believe unquestioningly in the authenticity of what is, when considered, such an unlikely setting.
Daily Telegraph Siddhartha Deb
A remarkably imaginative rendering.
London Review Of Books Thomas Jones
Such a note of restrained optimism isn’t easy to achieve, especially at the end of a severe dystopian fable. Yet Crace manages to strike the right chord with clarity and precision.
The Economist
Mr McCarthy's language may be the more striking, but Mr Crace has his own distinctively rolling, rhythmic style.
Washington Post John Crowley
Crace's America lies not in the future but in our uneasy consciences.
The New York Times Richard Eder
Mr. Crace is the coldest of writers, and the tenderest.
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
The best part of this novel, perhaps for them as well as us, is the hauntingly rendered depiction of what is already gone.
Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Crace strikes one as a kindred spirit to writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, and social satirists like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as well.
Los Angeles Times Emily Barton
The Pesthouse is never funny, but Crace's mordant humor shines darkly, making it both provocative and winsome.
Publishers Weekly
Crace's fable is an engrossing, if not completely convincing, outline of the shape of things to come. [29 Jan 2007, p.38]
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
It's a little too hammy to be thoroughly convincing, but it's a cracking adventure story. And Crace pulls off a transcendent ending that offers both a biting comment on the ongoing American experiment and one possible finale.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Joan Thomas
Leave the excoriating post-apocalyptic scenarios to those without your talent for lyricism. Crace's distinctive marked rhythms, just one draft away from blank verse, are at odds with satire. He can't quite extinguish the joy that percolates through all his writing, and The Pesthouse ends up being a lovely literary cipher in the way that Crace's work always is.
The Guardian Justin Cartwright
There are a number of rather pointless diversions and adventures, but they don't engage the reader. It is as though, by broadening his perspective to include America and the perennial American dream, Crace has gone a little beyond his natural inclinations and ventured outside the arena of his enviable talents.
Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
One always admires a novelist who is prepared to subvert his own as well as a reader's preconceptions; yet here one feels that the novel loses shape in the process...The novel, though still gripping in detail, loses its impetus.
New York Observer Adam Begley
It’s disappointingly opaque, like a satire with a secret target. I suspect that Mr. Crace set out to expose “the taints and perils of America” - but got lost along the road.
The New York Times Book Review Francine Prose
You can’t help wanting something new, something beyond an inspired melding of science fiction and the horrors we ourselves dream up in the dead of night. It’s disorienting and a little dispiriting — like some sort of odd déjà vu — to read about the hell of the future and feel that we’ve been there before.
The New Yorker Joyce Carol Oates
The new novel is almost purely conceptual, an idea-driven work that might have been more effectively executed in graphic-novel form, or in film. The post-apocalyptic landscape, though repeatedly described, is never more than generic wilderness, like the backlot set of a low-budget movie, and never acquires regional specificity. Where Crace's first, Calvino-inspired novel, "Continent," conjured an imaginary continent through the sheer poetry of language, The Pesthouse is blandly and perfunctorily narrated.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.7 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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