Silence Unlimited

The Wasp Eater
By William Lychack
Houghton Mifflin 2004

By John Caruso

Stories of families in crisis have dominated our cultural landscape for the past three generations—from the Mount Rushmore of dysfunction, the Tyrones in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, to the endearingly toxic Three Mile Island of The Simpsons, and just about everything in between, including the tragicomic barrel over Niagara Falls of the Incandenzas in Infinite Jest (I can imagine Wallace diagramming the trajectory, rotation and force of the barrel--the family’s impact--expressed as an equation and announced to tourists who ooh and ah behind the safety rails in post-empathic wonder). In America, we obsess about what is wrong with our families, probably more than any other place in the world, because no matter how jaded our attitudes, we remain as bound to the mythology of the family as we are to god, and we’ve simply had little else beside domestic troubles to engage our world class angst since the end of WWII.

As the silence surrounding infidelity, divorce, addiction and mental illness has lifted, dysfunction (self-justifying self-help term of the 1980’s) has become the baseline of family life, such that it now represents function. Dramas about the family in the 1950’s, when Long Day’s Journey into Night was first performed, were just breaking down the myth of the ideal family and moving from a state of denial to an acceptance of a flawed reality, so that the dramas unfolded with the air of a tragedy, as in Death of a Salesman, and the cracks in the perfect picture opened up on some shocking revelation: the affair, the grand delusion, the betrayal, the drug fiend mother—the fall. Today, family dramas are, to use the vernacular, down with the fall, and what we often see as the curtain opens is the family mixing it up, almost complacent now in its irony and eyes wide open to all the icky differences that pull it apart. Sexual politics, artistic sensibilities and partisan ideologies jostle for elbowroom at the breakfast table. In fact, these traditional fractures and eccentricities are not only considered an endearment, but also a precondition of an honest reassembled family working towards elusive unconditional love, or maybe just a truce.

In William Lychack’s 2004 debut novel, The Wasp Eater, there are no eccentrics, geniuses, genetic freaks or political malcontents to charm us with their unconventionality. Nobody is hip, wise or funny either. It feels like the work of an earlier era in its earnestness, unabashed emotion and its ability to register loss at the absence of even a faithless and sometimes menacing husband and father.

It tells the story of 10-year-old Daniel Cussler’s doomed attempt to reunite his parents after his father is caught cheating with a waitress. At the heart of Daniel’s nightmare are his parents, Anna and Bob, who fail to communicate to their son what has happened, leaving him bewildered and torn.

Though set in one of those long dead Connecticut mill towns in the year 1979, Lychack’s insertions about current events, such as who made up the heart of the Red Sox lineup, feel tacked on and continually jar with the sense that this story happened decades earlier. There is not enough of the world outside the Cussler’s home to create an ambience of either the seventies or of Connecticut in this brief novel. More telling, there are moments that feel like a post-war time warp, such as when Bob asks Anna’s niece Joelyn if she wants a ride and she replies, “That’d be swell”, or the description of Daniel’s first kiss:

"She kissed him quickly on the side of his mouth and hurried away to the porch, turning for one last glance back at him. She waved and disappeared inside the house, and Daniel just stood on the sidewalk and stared at the windows and smiled…"

The only things lacking from this sentimental scene are a sweet string orchestra and irony. Lychack’s sincerity is palpable, and the absence of ironic distance in the novel is more often admirable and refreshing than it is cloying. In a passage depicting the first night after Bob has been thrown out, he uses a few strong recurrent details to lend atmosphere and pierce the strangeness of that ominous night:

"He followed the sound of her that night as she paced the floorboards over him. Back and forth, the scuff of slippers almost endless over his ceiling. Her pacing became, eventually, a kind of patrol, and only the phone stopped her. It rang in the living room and she appeared in his doorway, her shadow bent large and long across the wall…

'We’re not home tonight,' she told him.

The phone kept ringing behind her—ten, fifteen, and then twenty rings made it eternal. The bells hummed in his ears when they did end, at last. And from the hallway she told him to sleep, though he knew he’d never be able to fall asleep now. He lay in bed cold and afraid and still as a stone, his breathing shallow as he listened to her move upstairs. Her voice sank down through the ceiling as she talked or sang to herself. Rain began to blow against the windows like sand, and he must have fallen in and out of sleep, because he’d sit up in bed in the dark and believe the front door had just flown open and that his father’s car waited idling in the drive."


Much later in the story, Lychack again uses vivid physical detail to summon the object of Daniel’s conflicted feelings and the inevitable loss that underlies them:

"He stood breathless over the man, studied him under the light, the dirty pocks and pores, the dents and darkness around his eyes, that yeasty smell of his sleep. And without a thought, he began to wish that each breath would be—right then and there—his father’s last. He stood over the man and kept wanting him dead and gone and far behind them. It was like a prayer, yet it was also the greatest fear that he had, the fear like a wish for his father to simply become a thing that was finished in their lives, like a picture or trophy, a trinket they could set, harmless, on the mantel…"

These palpable details make the best scenes bristle with life and emotion. What is both striking and strange for a story that unfolds with minimal intrusion from its characters interior lives is that it depends even less on dialogue. This is Lychack’s intention, and it is the profound silence of the characters—the return of the uncommunicative family in denial—that ultimately gives this novel its retro kick. It begins like a post-modern family drama with the fall coming right up front--Bob’s expulsion from the family domicile and the revelation of his affair--but then the rest of the drama eddies in denial and stultifying silence. None of the Cusslers can say what is eating them. They simply swallow their fears and angst, like the desiccated wasp in the attic Daniel eats one day.

Lychack calls the Cusslers ‘silence’ twice in an explanatory trope late in the novel, although, having endured their silence for over 100 pages we are on to the idea that they don’t communicate well. As a narrative strategy, it works to great effect in creating Daniel’s sense of bewilderment as a child left in the dark by his estranged parents, and Lychack is deft at conveying non-verbal emotions—such as Daniel showing how torn he is by alternately closing and locking the window to keep his father out one night, and then not telling his mother about his daytime excursions with him.

The other powerful communication comes by way of Anna Cussler’s rage. It dominates the early part of the novel. She paces the house all night, refuses to answer the phone, changes the locks, and tosses all of Bob’s belongings out for everyone to see (his clothes hang in the trees like Bob in effigy).

While all of this comes across as wonderfully vivid and strange in the opening chapters, we soon get stuck in the claustrophobic silence, like an unbalanced washer between cycles. Scenes with minimal or no dialog, and no fresh disclosures (exacerbated by Lychack’s vague chronology) begin to feel undifferentiated, as if we’ve read them before. The night before the moving sale feels much like the night Bob is locked out, and the recycling night scenes with Bob trying to co-opt Daniel at his window suggest not only the stalemate of the characters, but also of the author’s imagination. The plot finally gets a kick-start about halfway through, with Daniel’s desperate flight to reclaim a valued ring, but the air tight silence persists.

Not only are the Cusslers as stubbornly tight-lipped as people sworn to secrecy, but they also manage to go through a family break-up without much reflection on romantic illusions, why relationships fail, the difficulty of forgiving betrayal and the nature of loss—the kind of periodic insights that would help punctuate the silent rings of Lychack’s domestic hell.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan has asserted that the Cusslers don’t have “the language or temperament to analyze what went wrong,” and it is true that Lychack is exclusively concerned with showing us what is, not why it is or how it got that way. Yet, I wonder if this is a reflection of the Cussler’s limitations or Lychack’s. In a flashback that takes us back about six years, after Anna’s sister dies and her niece, Joelyn, temporarily moves in, there is a hint from Anna that Joelyn “was somehow the thin end of the wedge between herself and Bob.” That is the closest we get to an examination of where the trouble may have begun.

Scene after scene is devoted to setting up opportunities for communication that are repeatedly missed, much to the point, but sometimes Lychack goes a bit too far in anchoring his central metaphor by arranging silences for us where vital conversations have taken place.

In one passage, Daniel observes: “She began to ramble on about work and weather and chores, as if the chatter would help. And Daniel never knew how to help her to say whatever it was she couldn’t seem to say directly.” On the next page Daniel tries to relate his mother’s condition to his father: “…Daniel tried to tell the man how she seemed shattery, how she was like a statue and confided all those haunted feelings…” Exactly what haunted feelings has Anna confided to Daniel? The ones she can’t express directly and covers with chatter about work? Another page later we have this confession: “Daniel started to tell the man about the bills on the table and the dreams she said she had, the nightmares that made her sleep with the lights on.” If Anna is telling Daniel her nightmares, oral communication is going on not just the silent kind. By relating these to the reader only in summary, Lychack is able to maintain an apparent silence, the metaphor he is building, but only at the expense of the whole truth, an authentic novelistic texture and relational depth between his characters. A paragraph later, we have a summarized revision of Bob’s night visits to Daniel’s window. “…Daniel found himself again and again handing his fears through the open screen to his father. He handed each one over the sill like an apple—one at a time…” Oddly, in the dramatized scenes, Lychack shows us silence, at most small talk between Bob and Daniel, while in his summarized accounts of those scenes as an aggregate of experience, he describes soul baring conversations we are never party to, as if somehow the content of fears, nightmares and haunted feelings are not worth delving into, or he is proposing their existence without having imagined them.

The result is an avoidance of almost every opportunity for intense communication. He does this not only under cover of summary, but also by keeping Daniel out of earshot while vital conversation is going on. In one scene, Bob and Daniel visit Jim the Swapper, a hard drinking junk man who functions as yet another accomplice in the conspiracy of silence. During the visit “The boy sensed something in the silence, in his father’s impatient glance at Jim, and he pushed away from the table and asked if he could use the bathroom.” When he came back “…the two men were leaning close and talking low. Jim looked gravely at Daniel and moved back from the table.” Lychack goes for the child-in-the-dark effect time and again, even though here it is Daniel who absents himself and lacks the curiosity to eavesdrop. You can’t help feeling that Lychack is just manufacturing tension and mystery while he marks time with plot filler, because neither Jim, nor his hushed talk with Bob, has any bearing on the story. This happens again later in the novel when Daniel returns from the bathroom to overhear Bob and Joelyn. “Whatever it was they were saying, it was serious and private and urgent in some way…” Not urgent enough to disclose. For all the times in the novel Lychack has misused the omniscient perspective in frequent, awkward shifts, he can’t bring himself to let us in on the conversation while Daniel is in the bathroom. Even when Anna and Bob confront each other—after Bob breaks down the door one night, again during the moving sale and once more over the phone—Anna’s unforgiving rage dissipates like a cloud at the prospect of taking the form of words.

For what Lychack is after, none of these are fatal flaws. The gaps in experienced relationships, the failure to handle multiple perspectives in a coherent way, and a tendency to work at cross-purposes (undermining his metaphor by overworking it) all appear to be the growing pains of a writer struggling with the form and substance of the novel and not conceiving it yet as more than just one of his short stories writ large.

What Lychack gets right may be more important and a sign of his promise. He gives us ordinary, vulnerable people, rather than lionized eccentrics or insulated hipsters; he chooses direct language over word games; and he succeeds in confronting and eliciting genuine emotion rather than evading it with cynicism. If Lychack returns our attention to a less tricked-out and trendy kind of messed up family, it is to bring back something as humble and alarming as a dead wasp from the attic of our monumental family homes--the fundamental fear of loss that looms in silence.