Girls: A Novel PDF
Preview Girls: A Novel
Frederick Busch's 18th work of fiction, Girls, is a novel whose roots lie buried in an earlier short story. In "Ralph the Duck," Busch introduced Jack and Franny, a young couple trying to recover from the recent death of their baby daughter. In Girls Busch expands Jack and Franny's lives beyond this single personal tragedy to encompass a greater loss: the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl, daughter of the town minister and his dying wife, from the community.
Propelled by his own loss, Jack, a security guard at a local college, begins investigating the disappearance, and thus Busch's novel becomes a literary detective story. In the course of solving the mystery, Jack must grapple with his attraction to a professor at the college, the disintegration of his marriage, and the impossibility of outrunning the past.
From Publishers WeeklyBusch (Closing Arguments; The Children in the Woods) deserves greater success than he has so far received-though connoisseurs of clean, dynamic American prose already know and admire his work. His latest novel is a tour de force in which the setting, a college in upstate New York in deepest winter, the characters and the situation are blended so seamlessly that the reader becomes a hapless part of its grim world. Jack, the narrator, is a hard-bitten, decent campus cop who, with wife Fanny, is working out the bitter legacy of the death, years before, of their only child, a little girl. When another girl, one who seems like a model teenager, vanishes in a nearby town, he throws himself desperately into a hunt for her and whoever may have done her violence; in the process, he is so deeply hurt, both physically and emotionally, that he barely survives. It is a dark tale, but it's told with an economical mastery and intensity that only a few current novelists can command. Busch even manages to create a dog who is real, touching but never cute, and the perfect life-enhancing foil for the human sorrows around him. In its very different way, this is the finest literary thriller since William Trevor's Felicia's Journey-and shares the same passionate concern with the helplessness of young women when they become prey to predatory men.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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