Excessive Candour
Jamestown Blues

The first thing you hear is riffs. Jamestown is a novel that reads as though its occupants were trying to memorize it for later performance, and no matter what medium happens to be chosen to present their moments on the stage—journal, e-mail, graven letter, telepathy, internal monologue, prayer, scientific report, repartee, patter—what is heard, what is read on the page, is in your face the way acts are.

At times you can almost see the Applaud signs. It is in this treating of its characters as soft-shoe, and of the world(s) they do their numbers on as an extremely slippery stage, that Jamestown seems so 21st-century, so surprisingly capable of making the reader feel that it has been told from some point far beyond the events remembered and anticipated between its opening and its closing curtain.

To treat the near-future self-destruction of America as vaudeville is to view that self-destruction from a point way past it: Vaudeville may discover the true nature of the material it transfigures or travesties, but vaudeville is no way to dramatize the imminence of some thing in the world that has not yet happened. Nor does Matthew Sharpe lay claim to that category of novelity, of novel-writing, any more than do various other writers he brings immediately to mind: J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, John T. Sladek, Peter De Vries, Scott Bradfield, George Saunders, David Mitchell.

Before laying down a very brief synopsis—the Jamestown story should be familiar to all Americans, or kind of—it should be emphasized that the actual telling of Jamestown comprises a fixatingly brilliant charivari of riffs, and that the novel can be read, with great pleasure, for the buzz of them all. Each primary voice—Johnny Rolfe, John Smith, Pocohontas, several other characters whose names evoke the story of the founding of the first permanent colony in the New World in 1607—comes to us spritzed with stagecraft, sometimes seemingly overegged (until you realize that there is a good deal of self-parody in the book, characters doing themselves doing themselves), and then a sudden turn into a lacrimae rerum riff, sometimes very moving, vastation in the mirror, a good near-future default positioning of self to world.

Our brains are boxes

Pocohontas, for instance, talks to us mostly in what might be called Valley-Girl YouTube, but lifts effortlessly and instantaneously, whenever the occasion prompts her, into any voice in any register she wishes to use: scatty headbuttings with her teenage peers in the post-catastrophe Virginia where she and her "tribe" take the role of being Indians in a post-catastrophe Virginia; throwaways that stealth-deliver the burden of the novel, as in her side-of-the-mouth description of the relationship to their planet of the near-future New Yorkers who have bused southward to her tribal swamp, devastatingly inept but dutiful imitators of the ways of the CEOs who ended the West: "These people ruin what's left to be ruined"; the sudden acquisition of a black-face voice when she learns that her estranged father (the Chief) is dying, and the only way she can utter truth is by stretching camp to its uttermost:

You stupid man I love so bad, why none of this make you feel sad? And wherefore do thy lips so readily drip with the words of interposition and nullification? Howl, howl, howl! O y'all a man uh stone! If ah had yo tongue an eyes, ah'd use um so thuh ska would poe it black ink down onto thuh erf and thuh sea dump iss fish up into thuh ska and thuh ska dump iss fish it jess go from thuh sea back down on thuh heads uh the mens be walkin round on two legs down beneaf it like they know what the fuck they doin. Muthuhfuckuh you got to take me to mah daddy now.

"Okay."

If a touch of King Lear seems to wash the theatrical orb of stage this riff of grief makes to echo, then that is only right. At the end of the world, as Sharpe ventriloquizes its obsequies, our brains are boxes full of voice. At the end of the world—or as we approach Singularity—we become so loaded down with the history of our kind that the only way we can utter that history, which terrifyingly culminates in us as the burning shaves us to a precious few, is to turn into performance artists. So Jamestown is a stage.

Actually, it is two stages, or a stage so storiated with tricks and tells that the audience sees double. The surface tale takes place in a Ruined Earth version of America, an indeterminate decade or two or three up the line. The tinpot ruler of Manhattan (Jimmy Stuart) sends a busload of colonists south down the fragmented I-95 (which Manhattan has contractual rights to traverse) to coastal Virginia, where rumor has it that those who live there have retained some access to oil. There they encounter a tribe of Indians, and hostilities commence, though the invaders found Jamestown, where most of them die gruesomely from arrows and infection, starvation and crazedness. Pocohontas and John Smith collaborate on something like a plot, but very soon she and Johnny Rolfe—after communicating via several media, including e-mail—fall in love.

A yesterday as tough as tomorrow

If all of this sounds familiar, it is, of course, and Sharpe makes it very clear from the get-go that our reading of Jamestown should not concentrate on establishing connections between the events of the surface story and the early 17th-century historical record, because those connections are point-to-point explicit from beginning to end, even though none of the characters in the book ever refers to the fact that (in a sense) they are all playing two costume dramas at the same time (the Indians are not even Indians: They are redskins by virtue of the application of suntain oil).

The task is not to understand that this is the case, but to try to understand why. Why do these stories ghost each other; why do they work as each other's story prompt? A trivial answer would be:Jamestown demonstrates that life is going to be very tough in the near future, maybe as tough as it was in 1607 in Virginia, "so many adult males competing for extremely limited resources on a blighted land." This is, of course, part of the action of the book, and it may be that the let-me-finish-please narrative doggedness that afflicts some of its latter pages derives from the fact that the schwerpunkt of a lesson of this sort—however brilliantly couched, with jokes that make you cry and tears that make you gape—is quickly told. Jamestown does suffer a bit from performance fatigue.

A rather less trivial answer might consist of the suggestion that Jamestown tells two stories of the terrible cost of living in order to demonstrate not only that the two stories told are the same story, but that laid on top of one another they make the lines of the map clearer, that they are diagnostic. That the doomed utterands of Jamestown past and future do not only tell us that scarcity and stupidity and the male fist and hierarchy commit suicide in this particular context, but that Jamestown is us. Not just us as spear carriers in the drama of the suicide of the West, but us inherently.

So this is the final terror of this superbly staged, ferociously funny novel. What Jamestown says in the end is that the human creature will not stop.