| Review: William Lychack, THE WASP EATER |
| The Wasp Eater by William
Lychack is a gem of a novel. A satisfying swift read, without a wasted
word, The Wasp Eater is a novel that
leaves you wishing it hadn’t ended as soon as it did. Not that
it isn’t complete. It is. And both the story and characters
will linger after the book has found its place on the shelf. Writing a child’s consciousness can often push an author toward sentimentality or simple-mindedness or unreasonable wisdom, but Lychack ‘s Daniel possesses none of these. He is an accurate conveyor, a recorder of facts and feelings, and a child suffering along with the needy adults in his world who are supposed to know better, who are supposed to allow him to rely on them. The story goes like this: Life breaks, and people react in both unique and expected ways. Eventually, the breakage realigns itself, although never along the exact lines of its former shape. But then, didn’t that former shape suffer its own irregularities and oddities? So the psyche retains the memory of the old and, with no other options, adjusts, somehow, to the new. And that’s what Daniel, his mother Anna, and his father Bob do, more or less. Adjust to the new, even though that life never quite fits as well as the memory of the old. Lychack draws each character in The Wasp Eater with complexity, and each character evolves, is given a sense of future that sets the novel firmly in real life. What is most satisfying is the complication this author layers into the personalities – Daniel’s father, caught in his own deceit and surprised at being punished for it. Daniel’s mother, whose pride and stubbornness preclude forgiveness. And Daniel, fixed between the two. Listening to the mother who walks her nights away above his ceiling. Listening for the father who taps nightly outside his window. Fixed between anger and loyalty, love and disillusionment, frustration and understanding. Although The Wasp Eater focuses mainly upon the three months following the initial breakup of this family, Lychack manages to spin the story into the past and into the future and to show that once a wasp is eaten, the taste remains for a very long time.
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