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Jamestown
Jamestown chronicles a group of “settlers” (more like survivors) from the ravaged island of Manhattan, departing just as the Chrysler Building has mysteriously plummeted to the earth. This ragged band is heading down what’s left of I-95 in a half-school bus, half-Millennium Falcon. Their goal is to establish an outpost in southern Virginia, find oil, and exploit the Indians controlling the area. Based on actual accounts of the Jamestown settlement from 1607 to 1617, Jamestown features historical characters including John Smith, Pocahontas, and others enacting an imaginative re-version of life in the pioneer colony. In this retelling, Pocahontas’s father Powhatan is half-Falstaff, half-Henry V, while his consigliere is a psychiatrist named Sidney Feingold. John Martin gradually loses body parts in a series of violent encounters, and John Smith is a ruthless and pragmatic redhead continually undermining the aristocratic leadership. Communication is by text-messaging, IMing, and, ultimately, telepathy. Punctuated by jokes, rhymes, “rim shot” dialogue, and bloody black-comic tableaux, Jamestown is a trenchant commentary on America's past and present that confirms Matthew Sharpe’s status as a major talent in contemporary fiction.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published February 16, 2007
About the author
Matthew Sharpe
40 books30 followersMatthew Sharpe (born 1962) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City, but grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Sharpe graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. Afterwards, he worked at US Magazine until he went back to school at Columbia University, where he pursued an MFA. Since then, he has been teaching creative writing at various institutions including Columbia University, Bard College, the New College of Florida, and Wesleyan University. Sharpe says he started writing fiction at age ten but was finally inspired and encouraged to be a writer after reading Sam Shepard's play La Turista when he was 21.
Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Nothing Is Terrible (Villard, 2000), The Sleeping Father (Soft Skull, 2003, translated into nine languages), Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2007) and You Were Wrong (Bloomsbury, 2010) as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube (Villard, 1998). He teaches creative writing at Wesleyean University. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Zoetrope, BOMB, McSweeney's, American Letters & Commentary, Southwest Review, and Teachers & Writers magazine.
Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Nothing Is Terrible (Villard, 2000), The Sleeping Father (Soft Skull, 2003, translated into nine languages), Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2007) and You Were Wrong (Bloomsbury, 2010) as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube (Villard, 1998). He teaches creative writing at Wesleyean University. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Zoetrope, BOMB, McSweeney's, American Letters & Commentary, Southwest Review, and Teachers & Writers magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
February 6, 2012
Throughout my reading, this book transformed within my perceptual apparatus from a darkly hilarious (and loosely historical) farce to a viscerally felt chunk of despair-engaged-with-directly-as-despair rather than despair-with-silver-(in-between-the)-linings. By about the halfway point I shifted from mainly chuckling and appreciating Sharpe's inventive and highly synesthesiac prose into grimly and silently accepting that there's ultimately nothing truly redeeming about anything, ever. That the world is a meaningless—albeit interestingly interconnected—whorl of chaos and destruction and pain, and while beautiful and gratifying to be within at various intervals, is mostly directed toward a great big pile of entropic decay and a resounding So What pushed out through cosmic collapsing lungs and a throaty void. The progress of civilization—a mere shell game of rearranged variables of violence and greed and selfishness. Artistic expression—vanity and petty distraction. Political revolution—same shit, different shovel. Romantic relationships—a mere tangle of limbs and fluids and deceit spiraling towards disappointment and gut-wrenching anxiety and depression. Bleak, stark, horrible shit. The types of descriptions rightly laughed off as terminally one-sided and gothy and self-pitying by those not caught in the grip of Seriously Bad Thoughts at the moment, but the types of descriptions that nonetheless bluntly and accurately describe the monolithic crushing feelings that can be and are undeniably felt by creatures boxed in by and are themselves summations of flesh 'n' bone—feelings which have no room or basic constitution for things like nuance and complexity and perspectival shifts allowing one to See Tomorrow As a New Day or silver linings as non-delusional or non-trivial. To feel psychic pain so tremendous and claustrophobic and inexorable that words fail to bring it to a truly living and radiant description perhaps precisely because it's, by definition, the kind of thing words fail to alleviate. The most condensed one-liner of a description of such a mental state that even gets close for me comes (of course) from a guy whose name begins with 'Dav' and ends with 'allace', which is described as basically a inescapably intense feeling that every cell, molecule, atom and subatomic particle that composes the duly plagued person feels utterly, pinnacle-y nauseous, yet paralytically unable to vomit and attain cathartic amelioration.
This book is hilarious, though. And emotionally poignant (even its less than picturesque central love story). But also unrelentingly dark in many ways. Characters are often roiling in a cornucopia of disease and physical pain and all too regularly live amidst extreme violence and uncertainty about futures both immediate and less so. Almost all of the sex is violent and encased in dirt and mucus and feral, subhuman grunts and cerebellum-piercing yelps and excretions of purely profane physical relief that all mainly manage to avoid anything to do with such quaint and luxuriant ideas as 'love' and 'affection'.
But again, it's a surrealistic laugh riot.
And this is a laugh riot ("Remember that one bares their teeth while laughing") in which a (not-too-far-off-in-all-probability) futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopian conceit collides in a biting (as in literally, with teeth) and erotically undulating embrace with the tropes of 17th century pioneering adventure tales, replete with arrow-slinging and tomahawk-wielding Natives and counterpoints of dusty, grizzled, raggedly-bearded Caucasian 'settlers' with newfangled machines, spanning the technological gauntlet from high-powered autobus-mounted firearms to touch screen sensitive pixelations capable of transmitting and receiving both battle plans and love notes. Of course in this dirt-caked fuck-fest of a collision the conceit and tropes are skewed, rearranged, gorgeously and uniquely re-envisioned and generally flipped on their disease-ridden asses in order to make for an emotionally engaging and cerebrally incisive 300+ p. slice of novelistic experience. Characters live in uber-simplistic/-filthy tents while using mobile texting devices. They’ll talk about trailing (oft-radiation-infused) animals on the hunt while making reference to the Chrysler building (which is a collapsed column of ash along with most of NYC and its interlocking and tribally warring boroughs). They cook up corn gruel on greasy campfires while sitting right outside of their Mad Max style autobus. So yes, certain narrative conventions collide and shift about throughout the book, but in a very organic, unobstrusive, non-clever-for-clever's-sake way. Most of the story is written in various first person POVs which range from the brute and immediate thoughts of a person's encounters with sex and/or violence scrawled in raw onomatopoeia to the extended chin-rubbing, starry-eyed musings of a philosopher-poet (puppeteered by a self-conscious enough author to make them both sincere and deep-minded without becoming annoyingly self-important, in fact, they're often hilarious, subtle parodies of self-important deep-mindedness).
And whatever the tone or objects/subjects of depiction, Sharpe's overall way with words always remains fresh and vivid and fascinating to me. One such e.g. is his description of the basic human experience of living as a "heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made out of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth." Another would be his description of the titular Jamestown as "this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step [and] bespoke the yearning bullshit of men's souls." Or how to look up at the sky during a clear day is to be "blinded by the nothing that hung between the sun and their eyes." And on and on these little gems trail through the bombed out cavities and the condensed ash plains of paper and ink.
A final, extra-textual, somewhat thematically-relevant observation about this reading and reviewing exercise is that there's something to the notion that one can overload themselves with blunt, hyperbolic descriptions of certain states in order to alleviate those very states. I’ve thought about this before. When I reach foul and desperate enough moods in which altering them with things that traditionally bring about cheer and sunshine (or at least neutral distraction) simply compounds the scope and intensity of the foulness because the fear and frustration brought about by witnessing these traditional means fail in spectacularly unnerving ways—when this happens I’ve noticed that encountering egregiously dark materials{1} with enough gusto can eventually begin to untangle the cognitive/connotive knot in one's mind, if not transform and malleate the whole mess into an altogether new light. Sharpe does this at various points within his bleak and phantasmagorial comedy, and while the Reading Me didn’t really appreciate the benefits fully (to say the least), the Reviewing Me now thanks him for it, despite the fact that the only thing that really counts in life is the Heat Death of the Universe.
____________________________________________
{1} Shortlist E.g.: the tremendously bleak, albeit gorgeous, aphorisms of Emil Cioran, or the woe-is-me mania of Fernando Pessoa, or the crushing melancholy of a song by Mark Linkous—or any number of minor-chord-anchored, tear-duct-tingling tracks by any number of musicians—etc, etc, etc, etc.
"To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collar bone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e.coli and lactobacilli in you, too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom, swollen and throbbing, off color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases. everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place, bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very . . . very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one."
This book is hilarious, though. And emotionally poignant (even its less than picturesque central love story). But also unrelentingly dark in many ways. Characters are often roiling in a cornucopia of disease and physical pain and all too regularly live amidst extreme violence and uncertainty about futures both immediate and less so. Almost all of the sex is violent and encased in dirt and mucus and feral, subhuman grunts and cerebellum-piercing yelps and excretions of purely profane physical relief that all mainly manage to avoid anything to do with such quaint and luxuriant ideas as 'love' and 'affection'.
But again, it's a surrealistic laugh riot.
And this is a laugh riot ("Remember that one bares their teeth while laughing") in which a (not-too-far-off-in-all-probability) futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopian conceit collides in a biting (as in literally, with teeth) and erotically undulating embrace with the tropes of 17th century pioneering adventure tales, replete with arrow-slinging and tomahawk-wielding Natives and counterpoints of dusty, grizzled, raggedly-bearded Caucasian 'settlers' with newfangled machines, spanning the technological gauntlet from high-powered autobus-mounted firearms to touch screen sensitive pixelations capable of transmitting and receiving both battle plans and love notes. Of course in this dirt-caked fuck-fest of a collision the conceit and tropes are skewed, rearranged, gorgeously and uniquely re-envisioned and generally flipped on their disease-ridden asses in order to make for an emotionally engaging and cerebrally incisive 300+ p. slice of novelistic experience. Characters live in uber-simplistic/-filthy tents while using mobile texting devices. They’ll talk about trailing (oft-radiation-infused) animals on the hunt while making reference to the Chrysler building (which is a collapsed column of ash along with most of NYC and its interlocking and tribally warring boroughs). They cook up corn gruel on greasy campfires while sitting right outside of their Mad Max style autobus. So yes, certain narrative conventions collide and shift about throughout the book, but in a very organic, unobstrusive, non-clever-for-clever's-sake way. Most of the story is written in various first person POVs which range from the brute and immediate thoughts of a person's encounters with sex and/or violence scrawled in raw onomatopoeia to the extended chin-rubbing, starry-eyed musings of a philosopher-poet (puppeteered by a self-conscious enough author to make them both sincere and deep-minded without becoming annoyingly self-important, in fact, they're often hilarious, subtle parodies of self-important deep-mindedness).
And whatever the tone or objects/subjects of depiction, Sharpe's overall way with words always remains fresh and vivid and fascinating to me. One such e.g. is his description of the basic human experience of living as a "heroic struggle against the exigencies of having a body made out of a trillion cells each with a hungry mouth." Another would be his description of the titular Jamestown as "this wet and sucking thing that vied with my foot for my boot at every step [and] bespoke the yearning bullshit of men's souls." Or how to look up at the sky during a clear day is to be "blinded by the nothing that hung between the sun and their eyes." And on and on these little gems trail through the bombed out cavities and the condensed ash plains of paper and ink.
A final, extra-textual, somewhat thematically-relevant observation about this reading and reviewing exercise is that there's something to the notion that one can overload themselves with blunt, hyperbolic descriptions of certain states in order to alleviate those very states. I’ve thought about this before. When I reach foul and desperate enough moods in which altering them with things that traditionally bring about cheer and sunshine (or at least neutral distraction) simply compounds the scope and intensity of the foulness because the fear and frustration brought about by witnessing these traditional means fail in spectacularly unnerving ways—when this happens I’ve noticed that encountering egregiously dark materials{1} with enough gusto can eventually begin to untangle the cognitive/connotive knot in one's mind, if not transform and malleate the whole mess into an altogether new light. Sharpe does this at various points within his bleak and phantasmagorial comedy, and while the Reading Me didn’t really appreciate the benefits fully (to say the least), the Reviewing Me now thanks him for it, despite the fact that the only thing that really counts in life is the Heat Death of the Universe.
____________________________________________
{1} Shortlist E.g.: the tremendously bleak, albeit gorgeous, aphorisms of Emil Cioran, or the woe-is-me mania of Fernando Pessoa, or the crushing melancholy of a song by Mark Linkous—or any number of minor-chord-anchored, tear-duct-tingling tracks by any number of musicians—etc, etc, etc, etc.
July 12, 2007
(Full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE: I am personal friends with a number of staff members of Soft Skull Press, publishers of Jamestown, even to the extent of sometimes staying on their couches during past trips to New York. It should be kept in mind while reading this review.)
Is it just me, or has there been just a whole slew of high-profile, so-called "high literature" novels about the Apocalypse published in the last year? There's Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, for example (which I've reviewed here in the past); Tatyana Tolstaya's Russia-based The Slynx (which I've also reviewed); Jim Crace's The Pesthouse (which I've kinda reviewed, or at least explained why I found it too awful to actually finish); not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I haven't read...yet), plus any others that I'm forgetting or haven't heard of in the first place.
Whew! And now onto this pile you can add the insanely great Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, which very easily is the best of them all, because it is in fact a whole bunch of different things at once: not just a political comment on the Bush administration and 9/11 that many of the others are, but also a new examination of a historical event from the point of view of what we traditionally have considered the "enemy," not to mention a slick and mentally dazzling tone poem at times that combines sophisticated rhyme and meter with the throwaway language of our modern instant-messengering times. And did I mention that it's slapstick-funny at points? And also dirty and sometimes fiercely politically incorrect? Yeah, it's that too.
So with all these things going on in one book, where do we even start? Well, probably with the most well-known thing about it, the gimmick that got it all its original press when it first came out -- that the novel is a literal re-telling of the Jamestown myth, the 1600s story of the very first permanent English settlement in North America, which has been embellished so much over the centuries that no one's quite sure what to believe anymore; but in this case under the setting of a post-apocalyptic America, one where a Road Warrior type group of stragglers have managed to take over a large chunk of Manhattan and form their own twisted combination of gang and corporation, who are just now starting to send exploratory groups into the radioactive wilds of Virginia, to start collecting such needed supplies as oil, trees, and uncontaminated food (if any can be found).
And let's just be honest...
Is it just me, or has there been just a whole slew of high-profile, so-called "high literature" novels about the Apocalypse published in the last year? There's Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, for example (which I've reviewed here in the past); Tatyana Tolstaya's Russia-based The Slynx (which I've also reviewed); Jim Crace's The Pesthouse (which I've kinda reviewed, or at least explained why I found it too awful to actually finish); not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I haven't read...yet), plus any others that I'm forgetting or haven't heard of in the first place.
Whew! And now onto this pile you can add the insanely great Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, which very easily is the best of them all, because it is in fact a whole bunch of different things at once: not just a political comment on the Bush administration and 9/11 that many of the others are, but also a new examination of a historical event from the point of view of what we traditionally have considered the "enemy," not to mention a slick and mentally dazzling tone poem at times that combines sophisticated rhyme and meter with the throwaway language of our modern instant-messengering times. And did I mention that it's slapstick-funny at points? And also dirty and sometimes fiercely politically incorrect? Yeah, it's that too.
So with all these things going on in one book, where do we even start? Well, probably with the most well-known thing about it, the gimmick that got it all its original press when it first came out -- that the novel is a literal re-telling of the Jamestown myth, the 1600s story of the very first permanent English settlement in North America, which has been embellished so much over the centuries that no one's quite sure what to believe anymore; but in this case under the setting of a post-apocalyptic America, one where a Road Warrior type group of stragglers have managed to take over a large chunk of Manhattan and form their own twisted combination of gang and corporation, who are just now starting to send exploratory groups into the radioactive wilds of Virginia, to start collecting such needed supplies as oil, trees, and uncontaminated food (if any can be found).
And let's just be honest...
October 23, 2015
This was originally to be read a month ago, as part of what I deemed the Calamity Song detor, then the tsunami happened and I didn't find it clever any longer. I dove into this last night and read half of it. the concluding half was digested today as the rain returned. The author's composure is promising, there is better work ahead -- once he outgrows his snark.
July 16, 2019
Pocahontas meets Mad Max. Re-tells the "classic" Jamestown story of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, except set in a grimy post-apocalyptic wasteland sometime in the near future.
Matthew Sharpe first came to my attention with his excellent novel You Were Wrong, in which I was dazzed by his DFW-ian sentence construction, bizarre humor, and moments of genuine insight. I think "You Were Wrong" is the stronger work, but there's still a lot to like here. Sharpe's humor is bonkers, to say the least. It's kind of similar to Steve Totlz -- basically a stand-up comedian in the body of a literary novelist.
The story itself is pretty dark and unrelentingly cynical (thankfully offset by the humorous writing style), and Sharpe goes through great pains to convey just how dirty everything is. Blood is shed, bodies mangled, sex organs are described, mud and shit cover everything. It's not a pretty world. At times you start to wonder what everyone is even fighting for, other than pure survival.
The John Smith/Pocahontas love story is given some really interesting twists, portraying Pocahontas as an ultra manic pixie dream girl on an eternal sugar buzz. If you have an interest of the time period beyond watching the Disney movie, I'm sure there's a lot more to appreciate here than I was able to pick up.
All in all, a nice little parody with prose that is right up my alley. It's a shame Sharpe seemingly hasn't written anything since 2010. I remember being floored by You Were Wrong, and this shows flashes of brilliance as well. Hopefully more people can discover this guy!
Matthew Sharpe first came to my attention with his excellent novel You Were Wrong, in which I was dazzed by his DFW-ian sentence construction, bizarre humor, and moments of genuine insight. I think "You Were Wrong" is the stronger work, but there's still a lot to like here. Sharpe's humor is bonkers, to say the least. It's kind of similar to Steve Totlz -- basically a stand-up comedian in the body of a literary novelist.
The story itself is pretty dark and unrelentingly cynical (thankfully offset by the humorous writing style), and Sharpe goes through great pains to convey just how dirty everything is. Blood is shed, bodies mangled, sex organs are described, mud and shit cover everything. It's not a pretty world. At times you start to wonder what everyone is even fighting for, other than pure survival.
The John Smith/Pocahontas love story is given some really interesting twists, portraying Pocahontas as an ultra manic pixie dream girl on an eternal sugar buzz. If you have an interest of the time period beyond watching the Disney movie, I'm sure there's a lot more to appreciate here than I was able to pick up.
All in all, a nice little parody with prose that is right up my alley. It's a shame Sharpe seemingly hasn't written anything since 2010. I remember being floored by You Were Wrong, and this shows flashes of brilliance as well. Hopefully more people can discover this guy!
October 15, 2007
I did not finish this book. I know it's received praise from all over the place, and it was the LBC's "Read This!" book from the summer, but I got half way through and still wasn't enjoying it.
I don't think the author did what he intended to do, I thought it was too clever by half and while parts were funny, mostly I found it annoying. I guess my sense of humor slips a little in his portrayal of the "Indians"--with the title JAMESTOWN, I wasn't sure if this was allegory, or satire, or farce, or all three. In any case, I found it problematic at best.
I don't think the author did what he intended to do, I thought it was too clever by half and while parts were funny, mostly I found it annoying. I guess my sense of humor slips a little in his portrayal of the "Indians"--with the title JAMESTOWN, I wasn't sure if this was allegory, or satire, or farce, or all three. In any case, I found it problematic at best.
June 11, 2018
Hilarious Voice!
June 26, 2007
"Jamestown" is a wild, violent, mordantly hilarious retelling of how the first permanent English colony in the New World came into being and unlike the version extolled in countless middle-school textbooks, Matthew Sharpe doesn't gloss over its influence on those who were already there. Indeed, the Indians' perspective on the events of 400 years ago is what gives Sharpe's satire such ferocious bite.
Set in the indeterminably near future, a ragtag band of employees of the Manhattan Company (roughly analogous to the colonial-era venture capitalist Virginia Company of London) leaves the city in an armored bus as the Chrysler Building disappears in a cloud of dust. Their mission is to cross the wasteland between New York and Virginia, make contact with the local Indian population and exploit their natural resources.
The first locals to approach the bus are Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan's daughter, and her uncle and physician, Sidney Feingold. Johnny Rolfe, the Manhattanites' communication officer, is ordered to greet the natives, which he does through interpretive dance. Charmed, Pocahontas leads the party to a grove of red-skinned women. In a scene that is not likely to be re-created in a school play anytime soon, the women clean, clothe, feed and sexually pleasure the interlopers before sending them back to their bus.
The following morning the warriors unleash an arrow attack on the woozy settlers, piercing one of the pilgrims in the lower intestine. The Indians are held off with automatic weapons fire and the New Yorkers retreat to the safety of the bus. Johnny is called upon to mediate a truce with the Indians, which ensues, though neither side stops scheming to destroy the other. Johnny's loyalty to the Manhattan Company is challenged by its erratic management and by the realization that he is developing feelings for Pocahontas.
The first section of the novel alternates between the perspectives of Johnny and Pocahontas so that by the time they meet, the reader is completely won over by Pocahontas' effusive charm. At 19 years old, she's got a plethora of problems: She hasn't gotten her period yet, which causes her father all kinds of embarrassment since all of the men in her village want to bed her because she is the chief's daughter. Pocahontas is an exceptional character: part smartass, part wood sprite, and completely captivating. It would have been easy to present her as a cipher, a Joan of Arc type, shouldering the burden of history the moment she steps out of the cornfield. Instead, Sharpe has given us a wildly precocious and eminently likable girl-on-the-verge who is several steps ahead of every male she meets.
Throughout the novel, Johnny and Pocahontas correspond through a variety of media that makes use of the written, rather than the spoken, word. This form of expression is appropriate, for much of what we know about the original settlers of Jamestown comes from the letters they sent back to the home office. The scenes in Sharpe's novel so closely parallel the original events that the more one knows about the origins of Jamestown the greater one's enjoyment of the novel is likely to be.
Although there are plenty of parallels between 1607 London and 2007 New York, ultimately "Jamestown" is an utterly implausible tale. After all, no credible governing agency would blindly send its representatives to a perilous land they could never hope to understand nor control simply for the purpose of the short-term exploitation of its natural resources.
Thankfully, Sharpe's vividly realized farce plays much better as a novel than as the lead story on the nightly news.
(Excerpted from review published in the Los Angeles Times.)
Set in the indeterminably near future, a ragtag band of employees of the Manhattan Company (roughly analogous to the colonial-era venture capitalist Virginia Company of London) leaves the city in an armored bus as the Chrysler Building disappears in a cloud of dust. Their mission is to cross the wasteland between New York and Virginia, make contact with the local Indian population and exploit their natural resources.
The first locals to approach the bus are Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan's daughter, and her uncle and physician, Sidney Feingold. Johnny Rolfe, the Manhattanites' communication officer, is ordered to greet the natives, which he does through interpretive dance. Charmed, Pocahontas leads the party to a grove of red-skinned women. In a scene that is not likely to be re-created in a school play anytime soon, the women clean, clothe, feed and sexually pleasure the interlopers before sending them back to their bus.
The following morning the warriors unleash an arrow attack on the woozy settlers, piercing one of the pilgrims in the lower intestine. The Indians are held off with automatic weapons fire and the New Yorkers retreat to the safety of the bus. Johnny is called upon to mediate a truce with the Indians, which ensues, though neither side stops scheming to destroy the other. Johnny's loyalty to the Manhattan Company is challenged by its erratic management and by the realization that he is developing feelings for Pocahontas.
The first section of the novel alternates between the perspectives of Johnny and Pocahontas so that by the time they meet, the reader is completely won over by Pocahontas' effusive charm. At 19 years old, she's got a plethora of problems: She hasn't gotten her period yet, which causes her father all kinds of embarrassment since all of the men in her village want to bed her because she is the chief's daughter. Pocahontas is an exceptional character: part smartass, part wood sprite, and completely captivating. It would have been easy to present her as a cipher, a Joan of Arc type, shouldering the burden of history the moment she steps out of the cornfield. Instead, Sharpe has given us a wildly precocious and eminently likable girl-on-the-verge who is several steps ahead of every male she meets.
Throughout the novel, Johnny and Pocahontas correspond through a variety of media that makes use of the written, rather than the spoken, word. This form of expression is appropriate, for much of what we know about the original settlers of Jamestown comes from the letters they sent back to the home office. The scenes in Sharpe's novel so closely parallel the original events that the more one knows about the origins of Jamestown the greater one's enjoyment of the novel is likely to be.
Although there are plenty of parallels between 1607 London and 2007 New York, ultimately "Jamestown" is an utterly implausible tale. After all, no credible governing agency would blindly send its representatives to a perilous land they could never hope to understand nor control simply for the purpose of the short-term exploitation of its natural resources.
Thankfully, Sharpe's vividly realized farce plays much better as a novel than as the lead story on the nightly news.
(Excerpted from review published in the Los Angeles Times.)
June 19, 2008
It was an alright telling of the Jamestown story. There were interesting spins, such as warring sections of New York and idiosyncratic injections of motor vehicles and computers. It is in an unspecified post apocalyptic time period that could be any time period you would imagine (many think it is post-9/11 New York). There is a great deal of humor in Sharpe's writing; quite a lot of one line puns and quite a lot more descriptive sexual material. As the young Pocahontas was likely a young girl, the arrival of her first period being delayed and the interest in sex and using "adult speech" is relatively spot on.
Matthew Sharpe tries, and does not succeed, to use "modern ghetto speech" as a form of communication between "Poc" and "Johnny Rolfe" but it falls terribly to the inane. It's a good book to read through as historians looking for light reading but certainly not a literary classic to refer to on a scholarly level.
May 8, 2008
I didn't know I could like any kind of "historical fiction" but this is some crazy shit. Sharpe has engineered a new kind of epic with alternating characters and language that's as tight and ready to burst as an overinflated tire. Almost a 5-star read, and maybe it could have been if I would have been better schooled in the Jamestown story (I did much of my studying up on the story after I was finished). This Pocahontas is maybe my favorite character in fiction so far this year. See my little interview with Mr. Sharpe here.
October 23, 2009
I wanted to like this book. The premise really intrigued me and I had high hopes for it. Unfortunately, after getting into the book, it just turned into a revolting story focused on the bodily functions of dirty men. I ended up having to skim through many parts of it becuase it just didnt' hold my interest. It was either that or give up completely. I actually WOULD like to read a retelling of the Jamestown story still, becuase aside from sharing some names, this one didnt really do its job.
February 6, 2009
(From now on I'm going to try and tie in the appropriate music I listen to while reading a selected book.)
Hope, social commentary, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, black humor and raunchy humor...You will find all these things within these pages.
Recommended soundtrack to your reading experience:
Explosions in the Sky-All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,
Ween or a Monty Python Soundtrack.
Hope, social commentary, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, black humor and raunchy humor...You will find all these things within these pages.
Recommended soundtrack to your reading experience:
Explosions in the Sky-All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,
Ween or a Monty Python Soundtrack.
June 15, 2017
If you'd like to read a book about crippling diarrhea, frequent ejaculation, profuse vomiting, and bloody death after bloody death mixed in with a story of pillaging the "Indians" for their resources with no remorse then this is the story for you. However, if you happen to have even an ounce of good taste, I'd recommend skipping this mess.
March 17, 2014
I wasn't the biggest fan of this book. I guess that 'dark humor' isn't my cup of tea? I found that it was a bit abrupt sometimes, and others I was looking for a bit more explanation. Not a terrible book, but not one that I really liked much either.
November 11, 2015
A great mixture of history and fiction.
January 2, 2023
I think this book was either too clever for me, or not as good as it thinks it is. Either way, I didn't particularly enjoy it. I've read a lot of of (post) apocalyptic fiction so was looking for something a bit different.
It's based on the historical Jamestown/Pocahontas story and has a load of serious references at the back of the book, but it's set in the modern day after some sort of social collapse. There are motor vehicles and things like mobile phones, guns and other technology, but it's clear that it isn't that common and things don't function as in current society. A group from New York travel south looking for oil and come into contact with a local tribe.
The story was good enough to carry on reading and finish it, but it wasn't that funny and sometimes I didn't really understand what metaphor or allegory or whatever was going on. Maybe it was me, and if you're a bit more adventurous maybe it'll score better for you.
It's based on the historical Jamestown/Pocahontas story and has a load of serious references at the back of the book, but it's set in the modern day after some sort of social collapse. There are motor vehicles and things like mobile phones, guns and other technology, but it's clear that it isn't that common and things don't function as in current society. A group from New York travel south looking for oil and come into contact with a local tribe.
The story was good enough to carry on reading and finish it, but it wasn't that funny and sometimes I didn't really understand what metaphor or allegory or whatever was going on. Maybe it was me, and if you're a bit more adventurous maybe it'll score better for you.
January 1, 2020
A post-apocalyptic sort of retelling of the Jamestown settlement, with Pocahontas, John Smith et al. Impressively weird and funny writing I liked a lot, but the story never seems to do much except what it starts out doing--retelling this story in as strange a way as possible. Which maybe it's all a dark and savage commentary on the actual dark and savage history, sure, but knowing that didn't make the story any more gripping.
December 24, 2017
UGH, I couldn't get past the first 25 pages. Too much mindless violence with no character development.
June 18, 2019
Good historical book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 15, 2023
Pocahontas perishes to sustain the life-giving force of refrigerated ham: a darkly amusing romp through the past projected into the future.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 19, 2008
Sporadically brilliant. I like it a ton, mostly because it's the closest thing I've found to a Barthelme novel/story that wasn't actually written by Barthelme. Reminded me quite a bit of "Cortes & Montezuma," in particular, and for reasons beyond the superficial associations.
I'll be very interested to see what he does next.
***
"All right let me take a guess as to what a guy like you could possibly want when you steal into my tent at midnight, give me back my wireless device, and sing a song of love, and by the way don't ever sing. And move your mouth away from mine, your breath is foul, it's hot in here. You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You case your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love--not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death. You with me so far, Smith?"
"No."
"Of course you're not, but listen. It can happen--and this is what you want to happen--that this same love is extracted from the bodies of the ones it has possessed, and is used as an expedient to link one family to another, one town to another, one corporation to another, and then it follows not the paths of thought and flesh but those of trade and law, and is meant to replace but really just precedes and facilitates the theft, murder, and rape of one swarm of men by another that goes by the name of history. That's why you're giving this back to me."
I'll be very interested to see what he does next.
***
"All right let me take a guess as to what a guy like you could possibly want when you steal into my tent at midnight, give me back my wireless device, and sing a song of love, and by the way don't ever sing. And move your mouth away from mine, your breath is foul, it's hot in here. You know what love is because you've studied it, not because you've felt it. You never will. You know what love is? It's this insidious thing that infects your eyes and ears, spreads to every inch of skin, the follicles of hair on the skin, the lips, the tongue, a hundred million microscopic organisms crawling on you. They commandeer the hollow of your thorax and your guts, your arms, your legs, your head, and other extremities. You cease to be yourself. You are now a vessel of impressions and thoughts of the person you love, of wishes for her, of dreams of her. You're jealous of the air she breathes because she takes it inside her all day and needs it to live; it becomes her, as you want to. You case your thoughts of her and you an hour, a day, a week, a year, a hundred years into the future. No thought has the power to push itself as far into the future as the thought of love--not even thoughts of fame, or wealth, or death. You with me so far, Smith?"
"No."
"Of course you're not, but listen. It can happen--and this is what you want to happen--that this same love is extracted from the bodies of the ones it has possessed, and is used as an expedient to link one family to another, one town to another, one corporation to another, and then it follows not the paths of thought and flesh but those of trade and law, and is meant to replace but really just precedes and facilitates the theft, murder, and rape of one swarm of men by another that goes by the name of history. That's why you're giving this back to me."
May 28, 2017
The dreaded one star review. Let me explain myself. Some parts of Jamestown featured the most insightful use of sardonic wit this side of Joe Heller. But other parts I found annoyingly grating as anything I've ever red. Unfortunately, almost the entirety of the second half of the book was closer to the latter experience. On several occasions I had to put the book down because it was just completely failing to connect with me. Yet, I'm willing to bet that I wouldn't have found certain parts as grating if I read this in a different environment or even a different mood. I'm not saying I would have loved it, but I would have been able to tolerate it more. I guess that's the moral of this story, I didn't hate this book or the writing style, but I sure did hate the experience reading this book at times.
Matthew Sharpe has insightful things to say, but I think that maybe he was weighted down by the construct of the novel, a post-apocalyptic retelling of the colonial Jamestown story. I know this is a parody, but I had a hard time establishing some sort of relatable link to the book that would help settle me into the reading experience. The unremitting cynicism started weighing me down. The dialogue quit being cute and began to be grating. Maybe this isn't a great choice to first encounter the author's style, maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind, maybe I was trying to get through it too fast. Whatever it was, I can't recommend this one.
Matthew Sharpe has insightful things to say, but I think that maybe he was weighted down by the construct of the novel, a post-apocalyptic retelling of the colonial Jamestown story. I know this is a parody, but I had a hard time establishing some sort of relatable link to the book that would help settle me into the reading experience. The unremitting cynicism started weighing me down. The dialogue quit being cute and began to be grating. Maybe this isn't a great choice to first encounter the author's style, maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind, maybe I was trying to get through it too fast. Whatever it was, I can't recommend this one.
March 15, 2011
Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe is an odd, modern-day dystopian novel. Sharpe calls Jamestown, "an ahistorical fantasia on a real event." What he has done is take the historical Jamestown story, added Disney's Pocahontas to it, as well as other more diverse elements, and set it in an uncertain future USA.
Chapters are each told from a different character's point-of-view. At the beginning, the story alternates between Johnny Rolfe and Pocahontas, while later sections add the first -person accounts of other characters. At first I really enjoyed Jamestown. The premise was intriguing and the often satirical, black humor was funny. But soon it became a bit over-the-top for me. The jokes became stale and eventually the whole novel felt gimmicky.
Jamestown gets some things right. The quality of the writing is good and I liked the alternating chapters told by different characters. On the other hand actual character development is lacking and some of the humor became old. In the end, I think the whole premise of the story is what let me down. While I did enjoy reading it, I wasn't loving it. I felt anxious to finish it and start a more enjoyable novel.
Jamestown is not a book I would necessarily recommend to everyone, but I know it has an audience that enjoys satires and would enjoy it a bit more than I did. I thought Jamestown would be a recommended book until the end when it ultimately was So-so for me. http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/
Chapters are each told from a different character's point-of-view. At the beginning, the story alternates between Johnny Rolfe and Pocahontas, while later sections add the first -person accounts of other characters. At first I really enjoyed Jamestown. The premise was intriguing and the often satirical, black humor was funny. But soon it became a bit over-the-top for me. The jokes became stale and eventually the whole novel felt gimmicky.
Jamestown gets some things right. The quality of the writing is good and I liked the alternating chapters told by different characters. On the other hand actual character development is lacking and some of the humor became old. In the end, I think the whole premise of the story is what let me down. While I did enjoy reading it, I wasn't loving it. I felt anxious to finish it and start a more enjoyable novel.
Jamestown is not a book I would necessarily recommend to everyone, but I know it has an audience that enjoys satires and would enjoy it a bit more than I did. I thought Jamestown would be a recommended book until the end when it ultimately was So-so for me. http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/
July 29, 2011
Jamestown is a funny, smartass book with more heart than most novels that try to be the exact opposite of funny, smartass books--if that makes any sense. The characters are brightly colored cartoons for the most part, but both Pocahontas and Johnny Rolfe frequently astounded me with the enlightened truths that spilled from their mouths.
As with the movie Children of Men (and, presumably, the novel--though I never finished reading it, shame on me!), what makes these end-of-the-world works of art so depressing is that they perfectly illustrate how we humans continue to harm and exploit ourselves and our environment even as our selves and our environment continue to slide right into the cesspool. Yet for as bleak as Jamestown is, Sharpe counterbalances his predominantly sad tale with the aforementioned cartoon characters whose lust for life, one and all, provides a surfeit of bawdy behavior.
I hadn't expected this to be a five-star book, but Matthew Sharpe took me by surprise. With it being a five-star book, I feel like I should have more to say about it here, but I can't think of anything. It's brilliant. I hope the rest of Sharpe's novels hold up to this one, because you can bet I'm gonna read them.
As with the movie Children of Men (and, presumably, the novel--though I never finished reading it, shame on me!), what makes these end-of-the-world works of art so depressing is that they perfectly illustrate how we humans continue to harm and exploit ourselves and our environment even as our selves and our environment continue to slide right into the cesspool. Yet for as bleak as Jamestown is, Sharpe counterbalances his predominantly sad tale with the aforementioned cartoon characters whose lust for life, one and all, provides a surfeit of bawdy behavior.
I hadn't expected this to be a five-star book, but Matthew Sharpe took me by surprise. With it being a five-star book, I feel like I should have more to say about it here, but I can't think of anything. It's brilliant. I hope the rest of Sharpe's novels hold up to this one, because you can bet I'm gonna read them.
September 23, 2008
I read Jamestown for post-apocalyptic book club. It's definitely an interesting interpretation of the founding of Jamestown. It has a lot in common with other books that explore the cyclic nature of human history, like A Canticle for Leibowitz and Cloud Atlas. There was something genuine in the flippancy of Rolfe's and Pocahontas's attitudes, but it went a little too far for my taste. I think the novel would have been better balanced if Sharpe had given more face time to Stickboy or even some of the other Manhattanites besides Rolfe.
And now a short note on the book club after reading Jamestown and Dhalgren-
I realize that in the post-apocalyptic times people will probably be dirty, sick and desperate. And I accept that I will end up reading gross-out descriptions of people being one or all of these things if I am in a post-apocalyptic book club. But I don't enjoy having to visualize the dirt and sickness in minute detail for the entire time I am reading about said times. Maybe post-apocalyptic book club is secretly post-hygiene book club?
And now a short note on the book club after reading Jamestown and Dhalgren-
I realize that in the post-apocalyptic times people will probably be dirty, sick and desperate. And I accept that I will end up reading gross-out descriptions of people being one or all of these things if I am in a post-apocalyptic book club. But I don't enjoy having to visualize the dirt and sickness in minute detail for the entire time I am reading about said times. Maybe post-apocalyptic book club is secretly post-hygiene book club?
January 20, 2015
Jamestown is a difficult book to pin down. It is one of those books about which you say, "By turns..." and then list three or four different emotions it made you feel. It is one of those books where you don't really get all of what the author was doing, but you get enough of it that you think to yourself it was really deep. And it probably was.
Jamestown makes me want to learn more about the original Jamestown. Jamestown makes me wonder if it is racist, or perhaps an attempt at post-racism. I mean, even if it is racist, who is it racist against? It's about a post-apocalyptic melting pot of vileness/violence/vindication. Languages are confusing, as to make you read them harder, only to make you realize that this is all sing song, sling slang.
The book is funny. But not like "Haha." More like, "What the hell?" The murder is funny. It evokes slaughter laughter.
I like this book. I'm not sure that I should, but I like it. You might too.
Jamestown makes me want to learn more about the original Jamestown. Jamestown makes me wonder if it is racist, or perhaps an attempt at post-racism. I mean, even if it is racist, who is it racist against? It's about a post-apocalyptic melting pot of vileness/violence/vindication. Languages are confusing, as to make you read them harder, only to make you realize that this is all sing song, sling slang.
The book is funny. But not like "Haha." More like, "What the hell?" The murder is funny. It evokes slaughter laughter.
I like this book. I'm not sure that I should, but I like it. You might too.
August 23, 2015
Synopsis: This story is a retelling of the Jamestown story (i.e. the first English settlement in the New World), but it is set in a post-apocalyptic world. Jamestown seems to be in the same location as it currently is (in Eastern Virginia), and the story spans from the Jamestown area up the coast to New York City, which has mostly been destroyed from how we know the city today. A group of settlers set out from Manhattan, looking for a place to settle and create a trading post for oil when they come to the Jamestown area. The groups communications officer starts a strange romance with Pocahontas in an effort to become trading partners with the Indians in the area.
My Review: I didn't really get this book. It was a bizarre mixture of just about everything including rap and Ebonics and history and politics. Too much of the humor felt forced and it took me far too long to get into the story.
My Review: I didn't really get this book. It was a bizarre mixture of just about everything including rap and Ebonics and history and politics. Too much of the humor felt forced and it took me far too long to get into the story.
January 17, 2017
Trippy in every possible way.
So I have this (cough) decade long list of Books To Read, And this one came up. Keep in mind this was so long ago I have no idea what it's about. LA County didn't have it, nor Powell Books, but I tracked it down through Abe. I, erm, get obsessed about such things. So it arrives, and I'm expecting history, right? Not exactly.
I'd describe this as American history meets Mad Max. Set in a post-Apocalypse America, Manhattan sends a party south via armored bus to search for oil and establish an outpost in the hinterlands of Virginia. Written in alternating text messaging, IMs, and journal entries, scrawny soulful Communication Officer Johnny Rolfe and the feisty spoiled princess Pocahontas (the real deal, mind you, no Disney here) find themselves in love. Alas, we all know the happy ending is not to be, but happy endings are far and few in this world anyway.
So I have this (cough) decade long list of Books To Read, And this one came up. Keep in mind this was so long ago I have no idea what it's about. LA County didn't have it, nor Powell Books, but I tracked it down through Abe. I, erm, get obsessed about such things. So it arrives, and I'm expecting history, right? Not exactly.
I'd describe this as American history meets Mad Max. Set in a post-Apocalypse America, Manhattan sends a party south via armored bus to search for oil and establish an outpost in the hinterlands of Virginia. Written in alternating text messaging, IMs, and journal entries, scrawny soulful Communication Officer Johnny Rolfe and the feisty spoiled princess Pocahontas (the real deal, mind you, no Disney here) find themselves in love. Alas, we all know the happy ending is not to be, but happy endings are far and few in this world anyway.
August 21, 2007
Another recommendation from my weirdo friends, but another fruitful read nonetheless. The book was recommended due to it's highly scatalogical content, but what I found captivating was the painting of a picture without revealing all the details at once. Nothing was ever explained outright, but the picture nevertheless came into focus: specifically, a post "apocalyptic" world, where government as we know it has collapsed, replaced by tribal allegiances and a nasty, brutish and short life in a state of nature. Characters attack without warning, pursue sexual impulses without reservations, and act at all times in a framwork of the competition for scarce resources. Sure, the content could be off-putting to some readers, and it's certainly not actually about Jamestowne, but it's an interesting read for it's depiction of humanity.
June 29, 2008
Those four stars should be taken with four corresponding grains of salt. For each thing this book gets right, there's a lot that it doesn't. Characterization is spotty at best, and the plot itself affords only the weakest of structures. That the book is a "fantasia" on historical occurrences is an interesting conceit, but the fantastic elements seem loose, only mostly thought out, and gimmicky. However, Sharpe succeeds incredibly with his use of language to convey pathos, humor, depth and feeling that is largely missing from the rest of the elements of the story. The concept behind the book, too, is a good one: Sharpe mines the historical clusterfuck of the founding of an American colony to a millenial anxiety as we face what seems to be the beginning of an uncertain moment in the history of America.
August 3, 2009
This wonderfully quirky novel is a post-apocalyptic novel drawing on the Pocahontas story. With New York City mostly in ashes, a delegation is sent down what used to be I-95 to what used to be Virginia to steal a presumed supply of oil from the natives. The delegation nearly starves while the natives marvel at how inept they are and alternate between helping them and undermining their survival, even attacking them. The delegation includes Jack Smith, who's saved from execution by the chief's daughter, Pocahontas (though that's not her real name); and Johnny Rolfe, who falls in love with her. It's very funny, but very dark humor, amid much suffering and violence. It's perhaps the only book I could ever compare to a Tom Robbins novel, though the style is very different (though with some of the same playful use of language).
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