| Domestic life, in Frederick Busch's 17 elegant stories, is like a cracked windshield: one tiny ping of gravel can, in time, fissure the whole thing. In 'Machias,' a man remembers the exact moment his marriage ruptured; he and his urbane wife were listening to an old curmudgeon, and each came away with an utterly different understanding of the tale, and the man. 'I think it possible, as I look back when I dare, that our conversation in the shabby, lantern-lit dining room of the old man's house in Machias was the largest moment of my life. It went on. It is going on.' Busch's characters can't help but spill their secrets, and they're pretty grumpy about it. In the ironically titled 'The Talking Cure,' a young boy works for a veterinarian who happens to be having an affair with his mother. The boy concludes, simply, 'It's a story I try not to tell.' Don't Tell Anyone closes with 'A Handbook for Spies.' This long novella follows the life of a young, and then not-so-young, man whose parents escaped the Nazis in 1930s Paris. He is a professor in love with a married woman (a girl, really) who becomes a repository for his angst. With its dead-on campus milieu, its guilt-ridden sex, its inescapable ghosts of the past, it closely recalls Busch's 1997 masterpiece, Girls. And here, too, Busch comes as near as he ever does to delivering a manifesto on love: 'Truly, he thought on one of his icy drives, Kafka is the patron saint of families. He had impressed a woman in graduate school with this observation. She had dated him, and it was not impossible, he thought, that Franz Kafka, snug as a bug in a bed, was the reason. To love, Kafka taught, was to be suspicious of what you must pay for the love.' There exists no finer summing-up of Busch's own writing. --Claire Dederer |
