Absurdistan

With New York engulfed in civil war, settlers strike out for Jamestown.

JAMESTOWN

By Matthew Sharpe

Soft Skull. 327 pp. $25

You know that guy in ninth grade who was always reciting "Monty Python" skits to himself? Somewhere, in his parents' basement, he's now committing chapters of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown to memory. This hilarious, poignant and often annoying novel reimagines the first permanent English settlement in America as a modern-day dystopia, an absurd hybrid of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Walt Disney's "Pocahontas." Sharpe calls Jamestown"an ahistorical fantasia on a real event," which seems as good as any description we might devise for his psychedelic tribute to the 400th anniversary.

The more you know about the actual history, the more you'll be amused (or horrified) by Sharpe's weird transformations, but there's plenty of broad, scatological humor here even for those who couldn't find Virginia on a map. In Sharpe's zany version, the United States has collapsed, the environment is dead, and the survivors are starving. The ruler of Manhattan -- in the midst of a ruinous bombing campaign against Brooklyn -- sends a group of settlers (half of them "early-release convicts") down highway I-95 to Virginia to search for food and fuel on the Autobus Godspeed, a bulletproof vehicle that "differs from jail only insofar as it's more crowded and volatile, smells worse, and what surrounds it makes most of what goes on in jail look like a walk in a field of poppies."

The story comes to us through a series of short entries by different characters, such as the group's craven leader, John Ratcliffe; the indefatigable, often chained, frequently condemned-to-death Jack Smith; and even "A Couple of Fops" who are dying of their wounds. But the primary narrators are "the irreverent scamp" Pocahontas and the settlers' communications specialist, Johnny Rolfe. In real life, they eventually married and had a son. But here they fall in love at first sight, and their letters, e-mails, IMs and telepathic communications make up most of this story of disastrous cultural contact.

Despite the incongruous elements of modern technology, the old chestnuts of the Jamestown story are here: Pocahontas interrupting Smith's execution, a couple of horny settlers lured to their deaths by Indian girls, and negotiations collapsing into deadly skirmishes again and again. But it's all run through the meat grinder of Sharpe's freaky sense of humor. He plays with the names like a naughty, brilliant child: "Rat Cliff," "Poke-a-huntress," "Jacks Myth." Native American customs and language are subjected to the kind of politically incorrect comedy that could get a writer who cared burned at the stake. Pocahontas is a linguistic acrobat whose feminist wit skewers Indian pretensions as readily as it punctures Anglo cliches. Watching one of her friends prepare for the hunt, she writes, "If a man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, [he] would resemble that man." Later, spotting the settlers' bus, "I tiptoed, real quiet, Indian style, through tall corn stalks all dolled up in dew like girls in rhinestones."

But the settlers come off far, far worse. Beneath a torrent of sophomoric vomit jokes, sex jokes and fart jokes, Jamestown is an anguished lament for the whole bloody history of Western conquest, the stupidity and cruelty of invaders then and now. Back in Manhattan, their crime boss, Jim Stuart (think King James of the house of Stuart), lays waste to the city and tortures his mistress with bad erotic haiku after sex. One of the most vicious (and therefore successful) settlers survives having his legs hacked off and an arrow shot through his head, which he keeps there, ? la Steve Martin, while being carried around through the rest of the novel by two muscle-bound bodyguards in their underwear.

Sharpe's wit relies primarily on the juxtaposition of profundity and silliness, tragedy and absurdity, a kind of Catch-22 about the 17th century for the 21st century. Jamestown is packed with marvelous material, moving and funny and deeply provocative, but Sharpe is determined to cram the pages with allusions and fragmented quotations till you feel like you're stuck in an elevator with Dennis Miller: Here's Plato, Tennyson, Beethoven, Whitman, Kant, Shakespeare, Wang Yang-ming, William Morris, Otis Redding, Judy Garland, even Gary Coleman -- it's enough to make you stop googling and cry "Okay! Okay! You're the cleverest writer in the universe, but just stop it, for God's sakes!"

Needless to say, a little of this goes a long way, but Sharpe is a consistently surprising writer, who puts as many crazy demands on the English language as it's ever endured. Like those original profiteers and thieves, if you venture into Jamestown, you'll find more than you could have imagined -- some of it inane, some of it wonderful. Beware and Godspeed. ?

Ron Charles is a senior editor

of Book World.