My friend Danny introduced me to William Lychack’s writing a few years ago. The story he had me read was “A Stand of Fables,” which is about a woman who yearns for the sea, to return to what she was once before. The story is beautifully written with a vein of sadness streaming through it, like a red line of clay in limestone. And even though there was that sadness in it, there was also hope and redemption.
This duality of sadness and hopefulness is Lychack’s bailiwick in his collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers. Opening with “Stolpestad,” a story about an animal mercy killing gone wrong, Lychack bats the reader back and forth between grief and discovery. He doesn’t let up for the whole collection, and if you were to read this book straight through, you too may need to go for a walk in the dark woods to find yourself.
Lychack’s prose is lyrical and often sparse. It reminds me of Raymond Carver’s writing (or maybe I should say Carver’s writing heavily diced and sliced by Gordon Lish). There were several times I ended a story and had to pause, contemplating Lychack’s overall meaning, much like one does after reading a poem.
And much like great poets, Lychack knows how to construct a line that causes you to do exactly what he wants you to do. Here’s the beginning of the first line of “Stolpestad”: “Was toward the end of your shift, a Saturday, another one of those long slow lazy afternoons of summer…” Just try reading “long slow lazy” fast. I dare you. It’s impossible without sounding like half your tongue is cut off. Those three words slow the reader down, immediately putting you in the story’s time location.
Lychack’s syntax in these stories is like a short earthquake, often throwing you off balance, but never to the ground. This goes along with his major themes of grief and redemption, forcing you to re-examine the world, to re-evaluate what is important to you, what you can live with and without.
There are 13 stories in the collection. A lot of the stories feature birds. You’ll come away knowing more about flowers and gardening. You’ll learn where to properly kill an animal on its body. You’ll often pause and think and daydream a bit, much like most of the characters. Lychack sets his fabulistic stories in a world of truth to help secure your footing. And then he tells you that the world you know isn’t what you expected or hoped for. It’s up to you to imagine a new one, maybe even something better than was once here before.
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