Dan Green (writ first as Brown, so corrected) on Jamestown:

However, to the extent that Jamestown does belong to the increasingly popular genre (increasingly popular among writers generally considered “literary” writers, that is) of the post-apocalypse narrative, it shares an aesthetic problem I have with the genre itself (and to some degree with science fiction as well). According to Laura Stokes, “Perhaps because of these more “literary” novels, the focus of post-apocalyptic literature has also shifted away from the logistics of the world’s end to the specifics of survival—that is to say, less of a preoccupation with how the world ends, and more of an interest in who is left behind.” Jamestown certainly appears to fit this description–it focuses primarily on “who is left behind”–but I don’t think the “logistics of the world’s end” is ever very far removed from the writer’s, or, more importantly, the reader’s interest.

The personal and public spaces that historical narratives treat are significant to Sharpe’s novel, but I really wasn’t concerned with why the world had fallen. This is partly what I found interesting in Jamestown. The persona in the novel going about their business was enough. I started with the question, but ended not really thinking that information would’ve been of value. (I thought the novel should have ended 50 pages before it actually did; it got way too unnecessary upon Johnny’s return to NY.)

Dan continues:

Many readers and reviewers of Jamestown have dwelled on its humor, its lively prose, and its creation of distinctive voices among the various narrators who collectively provide us with this account of a new Jamestown. But I was unable to fully appreciate the humor (too much of which is, in my opinion, created by the rather cheesy use of anachronism) or the prose and its evocation of voice because I didn’t understand the context in which the jokes were supposed to be funny or the reason why, for example, Pocahantas talks in such a late 20th century, young girl idiom (even at times breaking out into what seems an African-American dialect of sorts). I just didn’t get it, although after finishing the novel I was able to retrospectively recognize the skill with which Sharpe manages to get his story told (not settling for the plodding conventions of “psychological realism”) and the energy he invests in his prose from sentence to sentence. Still, I also finished the novel thinking that too much of that energy had been expended in painting a portrait of the post-apocalypse that seems rather tepid and familiar in its depiction of human society gone feral after the worst, predictably enough, has happened.

I can certainly be accused of writing and responding to the “distinct voices” in the novel; this is, in my mind, the thrust, and I found P’s idiomatics scrappy and “vernal.” I think there’s only one joke in the novel: its historical circle and coincidental naming. Pocahontas is in the future because the early 1600s are not in the past. But in the novel Pocahontas is simply a Pocahontas, ignorant of things behind the veil of an un/re-constructed past.

I find all post-apocalypse stories odd. We fear or are interested in our end and our death and imagine a world without the “us” of now in a future where “us” is transcendent or back to the stone age. Often these stories take on the flavor of political scenario building. In fixing on the voices, Sharpe avoids the pitfall of having to explain “what happened.” I would’ve found that too heavy.

Stickboy tells us:

We ran through the woods. The always imperfect air, of which there’s not enough in any single breath, rushed in and out of my mouth. My friends–I’ll call them that for now; to call them by a truer name would take breath I still can’t spare–chatted while I gasped. Their skin was dry and mine was damp with sweat. What a curse to be born Stickboy, though had Frank or Joe been born Stickboy and I Frank or Joe, Stickboy would then be the name of someone cunning, swift, and strong; a man can purge himself of his name but not his body of its theme nor his life of its fate.

. . .

Their King, who shouldn’t be, was the only plump one of the lot, but even he had changed. The flesh of his face, which had used to billow from the bone like a pink cumulus cloud, now was gray and subject, like a rag, to Earth’s gravitational pull. “So,” he said, “you’ve come for the guns we promised you,” and as the flesh of his face hung loosely from the skull it clung to, so this remark of his hung loosely from the truth, though as with ample flesh that covers bone, his words his the exact shape of what lay beneath them. (185-187)

In a lot of ways the novel is about that sweet ignorance that comes of language and its metonymic system. I don’t mean any one language, but the human systems of communication, telling, and synthesis. In Jamestown, language is everything and nothing. The king mentioned above is John Ratcliffe, the ineffective leader of our group of adventurers. Stickboy, as written through the epistolary voice, refers to him as Rat Cliff. Jack Smith is Jacks Myth. Reading the men’s names this way changes them slightly, alters the angle from which they can be viewed. But, as Stickboy himself writes, “a man can purge himself of his name but not his body of its theme nor his life of its fate.”

Earlier, Pocahontas writes:

I walked with Stickboy out into the woods. I want to write a fabulous description of the woods for you in the exciting language of English, but it’s going to be hard. I don’t know the English names for woodsy things. There’s a kind of moss that’s soft and green and smells like the neck of my mom, who died when I was one. I guess I’ll call this moss mom’s neck. Mom’s neck drips or droops from the branches of the trees. The branches have leaves that fall off in autumn and grow back in spring. The leaves in the spring are green and round or spear-shaped or heart-shaped or radiant. The air in the woods this time of year is wet and green. When I open my mouth in the woods it fills with green. When I speak in the woods my words come out green.

This is true. Pocahontas’ words are green, green to us, new, hanging like leaves. She is green, vernal, and all the images these words will provoke, including naivety, but never just the words themselves. “Woodsy things.” This nameless generalization is a start, but “mom’s neck” becomes a personal, specific language, a name as prism.

Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown was a wonderful journey through “the idea” of voice. I write “the idea” because the novel can be read as an exploration of that difficult concept and its manifestation in the novel. Jamestown pulls it off beautifully in a space of imagined future and anachronism, where language and its complexity has survived, and since language is still used in this future, voice follows.

But the voices, in some cases, also appear to be translated into the language of the novel. Pocahontas is multilingual and makes frequent reference to English and her native tongue and their differences and similarities. The voice she speaks to the reader is the same voice that she uses with Johnny Rolfe, though mingled in with her voice is a frequent phonetic jumbling of ideas and names, such as Jackshit for Jack Smith.

Regardless, here’s a little thought on Pocahontas:

I am reclining in one of my stilted corn shacks that constitute my diffuse home in this grim passage of my life. There is a vernal crispness in the air that my bosom feels as gloom, and here comes Frank, whose nicknae is Knifeface, and whose face does indeed seem to want to cut your eyeball just for looking at it. Out the back chute of the shack I go, and am running low along the stalks of corn. What the corn thinks of this it won’t say.

. . .

I feel raindrops on my skin and they hurt, not because I’m going through a period of heightened sensitivity but because sometimes when it rains each drop contains a fire that burns the skin. What moments ago was vernal crispness is now shifting over to vernal blur, vernal pain, vernal fear of the fiery rain.

Voice is always in itself, even for the third-person narrator. It calls back what it once said or thought, what it once compared or saw, and reforms it, casts it differently as the ever changing object, changes its mind and its intent or meaning. Persona have memory and all its complications. Pocahontas is vernality. She has and thus is springtime. But she can also concatenate crispness and blur. She can feel crispness as gloom and fear. We go inside her language and follow her, as Pocahontas, through it. Pocahontas is her voice.