By Jamestown's penultimate chapter, the roster of the dead includes a dozen colonists, a few natives, "numerous fops," and "most men's best intentions." The 1607 Virginia settlement from which Matthew Sharpe's postmodern novel takes its name saw a proportionally similar mortality rate in its first years. But the novel's list adds desperate capitalists in search of oil to sustain an embattled Manhattan, and Indians whose red skin derives from super-strength sunblock, both of whom manage only a few moments of real communication in their post-apocalyptic lifeboat adrift on the waves of history. Retelling the story of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, Sharpe creates some clever surprises and develops a few memorable voices, but his conception is simultaneously too sweeping and too fragmented, and the quality of his prose suffers along with the novel's narrative drive.
