Frederick Busch (1941–2005)

I first read GIRLS (1997) more than twenty years ago when I was only just discovering the fiction of Frederick Busch. It's perhaps his best known book of the thirty that he wrote in a career that spanned nearly forty years. Busch was never afraid to plumb the darkest side of a man's most secret thoughts and nature, and he went deep in this one, about a fourteen year-old girl gone missing in a bleak upstate New York winter, and a campus cop, identified only as Jack, who is enlisted as an unwilling investigator. Jack is also the narrator here, and his own story unfolds in stages. A veteran of Vietnam where he was an MP, while he didn't see combat, he bears his own psychic scars from that time, and now his marriage is on shaky ground following the recent death of an infant daughter, an event neither he nor his wife, Fanny, can talk about. Grief and denial figure prominently throughout this tragic tale, but so too do infidelity and betrayal. Jack's affair with Rosalie Piri, a professor who is described as tiny and girlish, takes on disturbing nuances as he also tries to solve the disappearance of the teenager, the daughter of a minister. College life in the 90s is painfully accurate in its portrayal, as Jack targets a drug dealer, rescues a girl attempting suicide after an affair with her professor, and coordinates with a student committee to prevent rape.

And yet, despite all the dark threads mentioned here, I often found myself chuckling or even guffawing at small things slipped into Jack's stream of consciousness narration, sometimes subtle irony, and sometimes just flat out funny. Weaving dark and light together this way? Not easy. But Busch is a master at this kind of unexpected comic relief, as well as making you squirm at the nastier stuff or scaring the hell out of you.

I had read GIRLS before, but could not remember "whodunit," and Busch kept me guessing to the very end. This is simply one helluva good read, and if you've never read any Fred Busch, this book would be a good place to begin. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mere)

William Bartholomew was a soldier in the Civil War until he was shot in the face. Now a few years past the end of the war, Billy is living in New York, wearing a mask to cover his ruined face and making a dubious living trading on futures and stocks. He meets a man who intrigues him, a failed writer working the night shift as a customs inspector and they become friends. His other friends include a Black prostitute whom he loves, a Chinese woman who makes her money taking in washing, and a man who served with him in the Union Army. When his lover asks him to help her in a daring plan to rescue children from the South, Billy gathers his friends and a few others and comes up with a plan.

This is mostly a story of what daily life was like in post-Civil War New York, from the relative comforts and financial insecurity of a family clinging to the middle class to those scraping by with nothing at all in shocking circumstances. Frederick Busch tells a nineteenth century tale, seen through modern eyes but told in the voice of the nineteenth century. It's a difficult juggling act, but Busch manages to make it work. Here's a novel that reads like it could have been written 150 years ago, but which sees women, immigrants, the formerly enslaved and those making their livings as they can as full human beings and which looks unflinchingly at how they are preyed upon by the wealthy and white dominant class. But this isn't a lecture, but an action-packed and heart-breaking story of an morally-complex man making his way in the world and how his past, both his childhood and his experiences in the war, inform his present.… (mere)

I've been reading - again - one of my very favorite authors, sampling stories from Fred Busch's 1990 collection, ABSENT FRIENDS. Busch wrote about thirty books over a career that spanned more than thirty years, and he was a master of he short story form. All fourteen stories here are small gems. "Ralph the Duck" is considered a classic. And the opening of "Dog Song" can break your heart. But I think I will confine my comments to just a few lines from the story, "Naked." Here they are -

"It is a law of brain development that you will, when grown, remember every departure by every person to whom you should have called good-bye, and whom you ought to have embraced, and on whose cheeks you could have dispensed a couple of the dammed-up tears you persist in hoarding."

Reading these lines, I remembered the last time I saw my dad alive, in a hospital bed, full of pain from an as-yet undiagnosed cancer, and the too-casual "take it easy" good-bye I gave him. I thought too of Fred Busch, gone now for more than a dozen years, felled by a heart attack, and how much I wished Icould have known him. But that can never happen, so I will keep on reading his stories, novels, and essays. Thank you, Fred, for all of it. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mere)