Busch collection shows a genius for storytelling
Frederick Busch
Latest book: "Don't Tell Anyone," Norton, $25.95
Previous books: Busch has written some 20 works of fiction; the last, "The Night Inspector," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Bookfest appearance: Busch will appear at 1:15 Saturday on the University Book Store stage at the Northwest Bookfest. He will be interviewed by Nancy Pearl, director of the Washington Center for the Book.
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For a volume thick with stories, "Don't Tell Anyone" is a quietly ironic title. The characters talk - to friends or strangers, to themselves, even to ghosts - trying to make sense of things and relieve their isolation. Like the protagonist in the opening story, "Heads," the characters throughout Frederick Busch's 20th book of fiction are filled with "half-remembered words, tatters of statement, halves of stories, the litter of alibis, confessions, supplications, and demand."
Talking sometimes closes more doors than it opens, or taps into buried rages that erupt in threats of violence. As if improved expression could solve the problem, characters correct their own and each other's phrasing.
But language has a life of its own, confusing and concealing even when a speaker is being careful or terribly honest, and what one tells oneself can be the most treacherous story of all. The title urges silence for strong reasons. Yet secrets cut Busch's characters off from people they love, as well as from themselves.
Busch's world is problematic, but his stories awaken deep joy in the reader. In the gorgeous, heart-rending story "Malvasia," a woman brings all sorts of comforts to her recently widowed father, who wants nothing except to believe that when night falls his wife will greet him in the room they used to share. In "Timberline," the narrator's flashback to a dangerous hike with his father won't let the reader go, and this memory is only one dimension of his gripping present crisis. Some of an old man's haunting, half-realized wisdom in "Machias" comes from once having held together a broken telephone wire in a blizzard, so that a doctor could be called to help birth a baby. In the old man's recollection, the message passed through his veins.
Most of the stories are about the things that happen to everyone - a love lost, a child in trouble, a parent understood - but that never come with directions or guiding principles attached. The rules and regulations of bureaucracies, on the other hand, are plentiful.
In "The Baby in the Box," the legislature controls the police department budget, so the hapless and terrified night dispatcher at the station, Ivanhoe Krisp, is the only person available when a midnight caller says a newborn was left in a Dumpster. Our hero has to ride a poorly maintained, not-at-all-trusty SUV through the darkness to the rescue, and his wrenching question at the end ("Who . . . would throw a person away?") won't be answered by any bureaucrat.
Nor, apparently, by any God. The book's title could be a mischievous deity's instructions to the universe: Don't tell anyone what things mean. Don't even tell people who they are. Is Krisp a hero like the great Scots warrior Ivanhoe, or just a flaky snack for the hungry night? When the narrator in "Timberline" has an amazing conversation with a stranger, has his life changed, or hasn't it? "Nobody tells him which."
Sometimes knowledge arrives, although in bizarre forms. In "Bob's Your Uncle" a psychotic young man ("wily and odd-looking, very large and a little arrested-sounding, and coated with the grime of the world") drops in on long-ago friends of his parents and won't leave. His misery and menace become a coded message to the host about himself.
Busch's understanding and compassion are generous and energetic. So is his fascination with how life goes wrong and how irrationally, impossibly, we keep trying to set things right. Each of his very different characters speaks in a unique yet natural voice. His plots move like good horses with expert riders - a touch here, a subtle shift of weight there - through dauntingly broken terrain. His phrasing is often brilliant; his syntax does effortless heavy lifting; his humor is a constant, unexpected grace and delight.
"Don't Tell Anyone" is a hugely satisfying book, and its author (this isn't news, but do tell everyone) is a genius of a storyteller.