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Pocahontas probably never said this: “I’m still a virgin by the way. I almost ‘gave it up’ to Stickboy last night but no, I continue to be beautifully intact.”
But that’s how she speaks in Matthew Sharpe’s new novel, Jamestown (Soft Skull, $25), a twisted reimagining—really, reinvention—of the story of England’s first permanent settlement on these shores. Pocahontas is there, as is Captain John Smith (under the name Jack Smith), Chief Powhatan and a score of others. But it’s not the rough and untamed wilderness of 1607 Virginia that Jack and the others seek to colonize. Instead, we’re in the near future, and the world has gone to hell. A group of businessmen have been sent on an expedition from New York aboard an armored bus, just as the Chrysler Building collapses on itself. Sent there by the Manhattan Company (the stand-in for the Virginia Company of London, which funded the original venture) to make contact with the native population, the group of unprepared adventurers intend to insinuate themselves enough to do what exploring capitalists do best: exploit the natural resources of the land.
Like the original Jamestown settlement, things go poorly. Harmony is not the prevailing mood here, as settlers and natives don’t get along. Slung arrows and automatic-weapon fire are traded. No one can trust anyone. It becomes clear this wasn’t a well-planned incursion. Sound familiar?
“I think it has allegorical elements with Iraq, but you couldn’t read it with a one-to-one correlation in mind,” says Sharpe, 44, from his office at Wesleyan College. “There are certainly clear connections between our past and present, and I was interested in exploring them.”
Sharpe got working on the novel when a New York middle school asked him to come up with a few creative-writing exercises that would allow its students to better understand the Jamestown story. One of those exercises was to write a monologue in the voice of a minor player in the affair. He gave the exercise a test run, and ended up discovering his next book.
The story is told through the accounts of various participants, though the two major voices are those of Pocahontas and Johnny Rolfe, the communications officer for the Manhattan Company. The structure mimics the epistolary accounts of the first Jamestown, but replaces it with e-mails and instant-message conversations, and the hyperaware voices of the Internet generation.
“I realized I wanted to do a big creative project, and I was drawn to the extremity of the story,” Sharpe says. “In the back of my mind I was thinking about the violent origins of our country and ineptitude with which this great nation of ours began. When I started writing in 2002, the terrorist attacks had already happened, as had the Bush administration’s egregious response, and I saw a lot of parallels.”
Though politics play heavily in Jamestown, it’s really the prose that steals the spotlight. Pocahontas writes in a voice that is both savvy and innocent. She’s a smart teenager whose accounts read like MySpace blog posts: “Dear person who by reading these words will know me deeply and truly, Hi, I’ve had another interesting day!” Rolfe is no slouch, either. In a letter to Pocahontas, he writes: “I’ve got a lot of reason to be tense: the fire that wiped out half our town, the rats that ate the corn your father sent to us last week, other things.”
Its sharp and hilarious prose, deep and circuitous roots in history, and playful and bleak vision of the future make Jamestown a heady mix. For Sharpe, it was a way to present a complicated look at our current situation’s relation to our past.
“I came up with this idea of writing in the past, present and future all at the same time,” he says. “American history gets enlisted as mythology all of the time. We always read the past through the lens of the present, and I wanted to dramatize that, somewhat wackily.”
Sharpe reads from Jamestown Thursday 17 at Quimby’s.
