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.

The Wasties: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Reuss, Frederick

United States

Pantheon

Fiction "Quietly entertaining, thought-filled. . . . The narrative voice is particularly congenial--cool and unflappable, often humorous." --Washington Post Book World Not since The Moviegoer has a first novel limned the human condition with such originality and subtle insight. A small-town iconoclast who is at once deeply principled and occasionally as absurd as the world he rebels against, Quintus Horatius Flaccus (or Horace) has assumed the name of a Roman poet and has forsworn automobiles, and entertains himself by telephoning strangers to ask them what love is or what they think of St. Bernards. His neighbors in the Midwestern town of Oblivion consider him wacko. This suits Horace just fine, since all he wants in life is "the serenity of not caring." But people are conspiring to make Horace care about them. There's the dying librarian who finds Horace's morbid curiosity oddly bracing. There's the mysterious woman whom Horace rescues, only to become obsessed with her identity. And as Horace finds himself drawn into their affairs, Horace Afoot depicts the unruly dialogue of his mind and heart with sly wit and splendid generosity of feeling. "Delights continuously with its humor, originality and . . . unfolding personalities." --Rocky Mountain News

Horace Afoot

Contemporary

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Michael “Caruso” Taylor is a man with a problem. He can’t speak. In fact, he can't do much of anything the way he once used to. A successful English professor, he can hardly compose a coherent sentence, or remember much of anything he once knew. On top of this, he is slowly regressing toward infancy. He calls it "The Wasties," a condition with no known cause and no known cure. He throws his sippy cup. He bites his nurse. He tries to wall himself into his bedroom. He tries to run away. But as Caruso slips further and further away from sanity and adulthood, his mental life begins to soar. Distinctive, funny and deeply affecting,The Wasties presents a unique vision that offers insights into madness, aging, notions of success, and the desire to abdicate from the responsibilities of adulthood.

Dramas & Plays

Vintage

From the author of Horace Afoot comes this affectionate and beautiful tale of a six-year-old prodigy with a photographic memory and a penchant for the Gnostic gospels and Byzantine history. Set against the background of Caesar's Palace, Henry of Atlantic City is a satirical “hagiography” of a troubled child trying to make sense of the world around him. Henry, whose imagination has been fed by ancient texts, finds himself living in a conflated world of past and present where casino owners are Byzantine Emperors, and the world is populated by Huns, Cappadocians, and Visigoths. When his father, a casino security guard, lands in trouble with the mob, Henry begins a peripatetic life wandering from relatives to foster homes to orphanages. As Henry struggles to find a place for himself in the world, we are treated to an exploration of spirituality and childhood that is heartbreaking, uplifting, and simply divine.

Henry of Atlantic City: A Novel

Literary

In this brilliantly comic first novel, a solitary and articulate outsider walks the quiet streets of a small midwestern town, making himself up from fragments of Latin poems, shards of ancient thought, and a few scattered appearances before the county clerk. And the townsfolk are understandably suspiciousespecially when this man who calls himself Horace starts making random Socratic phone calls at all hours and turning up half-dressed every time there's trouble. Following in the literary footsteps of Walker Percy, Frederick Reuss charms us with the musings, vices, and brief encounters of a reluctant humanist who ingeniously challenges a broad American complacency with a charmingly specific search for meaning: What do you think of St. Bernards?

MacMurray & Beck

Following his much-celebrated debut, Horace Afoot, Frederick Reuss returns with another endearing hero. This time it's a six-year-old Gnostic with a photographic memory. Henry is being reared - at least intermittently - by gamblers, thieves, whores, and priests in one of America's most notorious sin cities. But from time to time, he seems to believe that he's living as a saint in fifth century Byzantium. As in Horace Afoot, Frederick Reuss's new novel describes the labyrinthine terrain in which we shape our identities and search for meaning. And like Horace, young henry places his questions into a distant and possibly wiser world. For some reason, the stories of ancient Byzantium help henry make sense of his absurd - and sometimes dangerous - existence. Henry of Atlantic City is an ironic, funny, and heart rending account of the ways we become our own saviors by choosing what to believe.

Henry of Atlantic City

Humor & Satire

When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimesand only sometimeshe can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces, and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story. Following just that path, acclaimed novelist Frederick Reuss has created a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era. With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss allows their story to rise from a cache of photographs he uncovered in Germanyphotographs from the 1920s and ’30s of the exiled Jewish playwright and novelist Max Mohr; Käthe, the beautiful wife he left behind; and Eva, their daughter, who would live through it all but would never really understand what had happened.

Mohr

Unbridled Books

When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimesand only sometimeshe can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces, and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story. Following just that path, acclaimed novelist Frederick Reuss has created a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era. With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss allows their story to rise from a cache of photographs he uncovered in Germanyphotographs from the 1920s and ’30s of the exiled Jewish playwright and novelist Max Mohr; Käthe, the beautiful wife he left behind; and Eva, their daughter, who would live through it all but would never really understand what had happened. The interplay between Reuss’s revealing prose and the real faces in nearly 50 photographs offers a reading experience that may be unprecedented in novels. From the first paragraph and that first creased image, which Eva may have taken, of the Mohrs at their table in Germany just before Max walked away from their lives, this beautiful and powerful novel works as deeply on the reader as a family photo album.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Reuss, Frederick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Reuss, Frederick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Reuss, Frederick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Wasties: A Novel

Horace Afoot

The Wasties: A Novel

Henry of Atlantic City: A Novel

Horace Afoot

Henry of Atlantic City

Mohr

Mohr