Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That basic serenity, though muddled in Wasp, retains for this latest book its strongest quality to confront starlight on the larger questions of morality and the universe. The most interesting dilemma posed and indeed and the only one carried through consistently, is the crisis of faith among the cathedral's staff in the face of terror and bereavement. At a party, someone brings up "a tidbit from seminary training. "a quotation from George Orwell...
...wasp] was sucking jam on my plate and I cut him in half. He paid no attention merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed verged esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened...
...that the soul be cut away"-ring truer than any of L 'Engle's accounts of death, shame and estrangement. The sections shows that the author's strength is still her ability to make questions of good and evil seem human and dramatic: the unnecessary clutter of A Severed Wasp suggests that she has mistaken her topic, but not her theme...
...protagonist of her newest novel A Severed Wasp, the retired pianist Katherine Forrester Vigneras, last appeared as an aspiring teenage artist in L 'Engle's first published novel. The Small Rain. "I always knew I would go on and find out what happened to Katherine later in life," she says, "but I had to grow up enough to find out first." The same half whimsical treatment of her creations carries through to the minor characters, such as one Felix Bodeway who becomes Katherine's closest friend in A Severed Wasp after playing a decidedly tangential role in her youth...
...Felix in Wasp is a retired bishop-specifically, the retired bishop of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City, where L 'Engle has an office-and the haziness of his position between fiction and reality typifies the rest of L 'Engle's work. Several earlier novels are set in the same Upper West Side environs of the cathedral, which are described with enough detail and care to give visitor a shock of recognition at the subway stop. L 'Engle regularly sends her characters off to drink hungarian coffee at the same Colombia University coffee shop to which...