Book Review: The Wherewithal by Philip Schultz

About the Book: 

I, one

Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,

Head Clerk of Closed Files,

a department of one,

work…

in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs

This astonishing novel in verse tells the story of Henryk Wyrzykowski, a drifting, haunted young man hiding from the Vietnam War in the basement of a San Francisco welfare building and translating his mother’s diaries. The diaries concern the Jedwabne massacre, an event that took place in German-occupied Poland in 1941. Wildly inventive, dark, beautiful, and unrelenting, The Wherewithal is a meditation on the nature of evil and the destruction of war.

Praise for The Wherewithal: 

“Gripping, eloquent, moving, this is a powerful tale about what remains hidden and/or unspeakable in history.” - Elie Wiesel

"Stunning. . . . The Wherewithal is about evil and suffering and the human capacity for compassion." - Adam Plunkett, New York Times Book Review

"An ambitious, bracing book about large-scale suffering…and human compassion." - Will Schutt, East Hampton Star

My Thoughts: 

1968 finds Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski hiding out as a clerk in the basement of a San Francisco welfare office. Secure in his clandestine sanctuary, Henryk spends his days filing paperwork and translating his mother’s diaries while dodging Uncle Sam and the horrors of service in Vietnam. What unfolds is an increasingly disordered and bizarrely attractive illustration of personal delirium and the human condition.

The parallel story lines - the mental deterioration Henryk suffers in his solitary existence and that recognized in his mother’s memories of the Jedwabne pogrom – struck me in a way that is difficult to describe. The delusions these characters construct within their minds are powerful and somewhat disturbing, but they take on an almost hallucinatory quality, as they are rendered in Schultz’s disordered and haunting prose. 

A deliciously dark commentary, The Wherewithal is an extraordinary allegory that deftly elucidates the nature of evil, the impact of war, the power of the human mind, and the unsettling idea that we are each our own devil and we make this world our hell.

Philip Schultz | W. W. Norton & Company | Novel Published 2014

Copy provided by Historical Novel Society in exchange for review