Frederick Busch

A short but powerful tale weaving together moral complexity and romantic intrigue, Frederick Busch’s War Babies is the story of an American lawyer in his mid-thirties (Peter Santore) who travels to England in an attempt to tie up the loose ends of his own dark past. Peter’s father, a prisoner who turned traitor in a Korean War POW camp, might have had something to do with a fellow captive’s death, the father of one Hilary Pennels––now a woman Peter’s age who lives in Salisbury. When Peter and Hilary meet, they both want information from the other, and more, and find themselves engaged in a wary dance of attraction laced with mistrust. But it may be a third person, the sole remaining survivor of the camp––a Mr. Fox––who holds the key to the mystery of betrayal that haunts Peter and Hilary alike.

The subject of Frederick Busch’s extraordinary fiction, The Mutual Friend, is Charles Dickens. First published in 1978, Busch’s portrait of the Chief (or the Inimitable, as Dickens calls himself) was immediately hailed as a lively, accurate, and brilliantly imagined novel of the great Victorian and his age. Busch’s guide to Dickens’ world is George Dolby, the Chief’s factotum in his last years. The reminiscence begins with the Great American Tour of 1867-68, Dickens is ill and crotchety but ever eager to dazzle the New World with his dramatic readings. Through Dolby we come to a circle of characters around Dickens, among them his long-suffering wife Kate and the actress Ellen Ternan, mistress to the Inimitable. Of Busch’s compelling mastery over his larger-than-life subject, the English critic Angus Wilson writes, “Mr. Busch gives us Dickens in all his genius and makes us understand how that genius worked.”

For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tended to set his fiction in a physical territory––the Northeast, upstate New York especially––which he has given literary shape. With the capaciousness of a Dickens and the control of a Hemingway, Busch’s novels have come in steady counterpoint, raising and answering by turns insistent questions that worry even the plainest of domestic lives. In this his fifth book of stories, the Absent Friends of the title are the lost characters the author has so compassionately detailed, who long to recover their absent selves. But they are also, as Richard Bausch comments in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “friends we have failed, or who have failed us; it is the emotional cost of that estrangement that interests Frederick Busch.”

Set in rural New England, Frederick Busch’s powerful yet subtle second novel, Manual Labor, explores the collapse and renewal of a contemporary marriage. Phil and Anne Sorenson––both in their own ways emotionally or physically crippled––search for an equilibrium in the rebuilding of an abandoned farmhouse that becomes a paradigm of their lives. Presented by several voices, principally those of the husband and wife, the novel is rooted in the American gothic tradition of Melville and Hawthorne. Having come in a circle to the East, to the coast of Maine, the Soresons’ journey suggests that of early American settlers who came at last to the sea. Of ultimate importance, however, are domestic love and the insistence, finally, upon surviving history without denying it.