What do You think about Girls (1999)?
The best word I can think of to describe Frederick Busch’s novel Girls is muscular. The novel has certainly received much higher praise than that. Glamour Magazine called it “powerful,” and went on to describe it as an intriguing crime story although the novel’s real strength lay with the main character’s “growing insight about his marriage, his town, and himself [which] transforms this page-turner about lost children into a tender and eloquent examination of the even greater mystery that is the human heart.”Jack is a somewhat cantankerous Vietnam veteran who is currently a campus cop at a small college in upstate New York. His wife, Fanny, is an emergency-room nurse. Jack and Fanny are mourning the recent loss of their infant daughter, Hannah. They can barely be in the same room with each other and so they work opposite shifts, drifting past each other in a haze of exhaustion and grief.Then a local girl goes missing and someone suggests Jack help out with the investigation, ostensibly as a way of working through his own issues.The characters in Busch’s novel are all messed up. Jack and Hannah are locked in a grief-fueled stalemate and neither seems to know how to make the first move. As Jack observes:"I thought, as I stayed where I was, that somebody ought to walk around the table and hug this woman hard and just hold on."Instead, Jack fills his days helping cars up icy hills, rescuing suicidal co-eds, drinking sour coffee with his confessor, Archie, and trying to figure out just what happened to the missing girl.Girls is a atmospheric and tragic story and the characters, particularly Jack, are well-drawn and convincing. The novel is often funny, too. In one scene, where Jack runs a drug-dealer off the campus, I laughed out loud.Busch is a new-to-me writer, but he’s written 20 other novels and he’s impressed me enough to look for more.
—Christie
Frederick Busch packs a couple of mysteries into this modest (279-page) novel. The main characters, Jack and Fanny, are damaged but likable. Fanny is an ER nurse and Jack a campus cop who, after the death of their daughter, has a special sensitivity to missing girls. A 14-year-old girl from a neighboring town is his crusade here. Busch peels back layers in his story and keeps things taut and the reader engaged till the end. He also dishes out a couple of subplots (the principled librarian was a great addition) and surprises. The writing is clean and unobtrusive. The dialogue advances the plot nicely. I stayed up late to finish this one. I'll look for more by this author. (I just realized I didn't like another of his novels. Maybe I need to stand in the library stacks and sample some.) I'd like to see something else with these characters, too. (This book grew out of something else he wrote. So, I'm not alone in being engaged by the characters.)
—Marguerite
I’ve always liked the way that Joyce Carol Oates has been able to capture the “quiet desperation” of muddling through in the average lives of New England and New York. I had never read anything of Frederick Busch before and this story of a nearly-broken former-cop-turned-security-guard and his near obsessive investigation into the disappearance of a local girl is impressively haunting.Not really a whodunit – the investigation is almost secondary – but the book follows the protagonist's inexorable drag into obsession and its effects on him, his marriage and his life. Real and raw – and with amazing prose – this book stays with you long after finishing it. (Note: the main character appears again in North, which was FB’s last book published before he died in 2006. It was also very good, but of the two, I enjoyed Girls more.)
—Steve Betz
