The Wasties: A Novel

The Wasties is a compassionate, darkly comic novel about a man who is slowly losing his ability to understand the adult world.

In Frederick Reuss’s highly praised novels, Henry of Atlantic City and Horace Afoot, we have the stories of people who find themselves strangely isolated from everyone around them. In The Wasties, Reuss takes us to a new level, giving us the story of Michael “Caruso” Taylor, a man who has lost his ability to speak and is gradually reverting to infancy. All of his most intimate relationships are redefined: His wife, Gina, must assume the role of mother; his day nurse becomes his nanny; and “Caruso” is reduced to drinking tomato juice through sippy straws and observing the world from a radically skewed perspective. Once a professor of literature, Michael’s predicament is compounded by a deteriorating memory of his adult self, and he begins to “see” the famous—and often dead—denizens of his former learning in everyone from a bum in the park to a doctor in the hospital. Walt Whitman, John Muir, Ralph Ellison, and a host of others materialize before him as he tries to comprehend and articulate his plight. He calls his condition “the wasties”—but what kind of malady is it? Physical? Psychological? Or some sort of higher madness?

Humane, funny, and deeply affecting, The Wasties is a satiric work of unique vision and voice about one man whose infantilization plays out a secret fantasy many of us share: to shun the responsibilities of life as an adult.