Here is a book review and interview that should have been published by one of my editors, but wasn't due to budget cuts and time restraints. So I'm blogging it.


Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
-excerpt from The Tyger, by William Blake


North, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc is Frederick Busch’s new novel that continues with Jack, a character first introduced in Busch’s 1997 best-seller Girls. In Girls Jack is a Viet Nam veteran and ex-lawman working as a security officer on an upstate New York College campus. He is enlisted by a local family to find their missing teenage daughter whose disappearance may be related to a series of missing girls.
North begins almost eight years after Girls. Jack is now working as security in a resort in North Carolina. Protecting the honor of a woman lawyer from New York City Jack has an altercation with Jason Arnold a gigolo that … “seems drunk or amped on coke or amphetamine. Someone that highly cranked is all energy and no mind…I swiveled my hips and drove my fist maybe six inches into the meat below where the ribs met above the stomach…all his motion stopped and then his mouth opened while his face went white. Then he caved in over his gut and went down into a ball on the floor…I noticed the lawyer was looking at me and not Jason Arnold. I noticed I was looking at her instead of him.”
The lawyer hires Jack to find her nephew, notorious for his gambling debt and unhealthy relations with unsavory characters, his last whereabouts known to be in upstate New York. Suddenly Jack finds himself back in upstate New York, full circle. Unresolved ghosts and demons of the past linger and keep him from attempting a thorough search. In true Jack fashion he bodily lumber and plods on with trying to solve the case and come to terms with his failure in finding Janice Tanner’s body, the missing girl from Girls, the dissolution of his marriage and his ex- wife’s suicide. Hardest of all Jack faces the Sisyphean boulder of the truth that crashes down onto him from the heights of denial about the real cause of his baby daughter’s death
Busch wrote the narrative of both Girls and North in the first person, a literary device used in noir detective and crime fiction by authors like Robert B. Parker, the creator of the Spencer series and Lawrence Block, writer of the Mathew Scudder novels. Busch’s writing transcends noir with both Girls and North because there is such an undercurrent of dread and hopelessness that affects and interferes with Jack’s natural inclination to do ‘good’. Busch’s skill makes North a heroic quest with the heavy psychology of Greek drama, the sparse and poetic prose of Hemingway and the relentless pace of a Koontz thriller. Jack’s voice is unique in that as a man of action he confesses he “struggles with words”. Even though his narration and inner dialogue are replete with insight and a lyricism describing the straight forward and colloquial, for example “The heat was heavy and full of diesel hanging like invisible grease on the lighter stink of burnt up leaded gasoline.” He seems unaware of the beauty of the language. Busch best shows Jack’s search for words when the character Sarah says to Jack, ““…I was in the library. Up in the stacks…It was when you were taking courses. You were improving yourself…you were standing in front of the shelves and you were looking. Just looking. You were taking books down and reading in them and putting them back on the shelf…You were…grazing. You were working the range. You were reading maybe just because there is so much there you could read at if you wanted to.””.
Jack is his own mystery, not only does he investigate and stake–out the surface of farm country in upstate New York, but reluctantly he becomes a spelunker, exploring the subterranean darkened depths of his haunted psyche. He mines and sifts pieces of memory and Strindberg-like dreamscapes. His angst is so palpable that Busch tries to ritually clean Jack within a pond, “I recalled how I had hung between the surface and the bottom of the pond the evening before and how long I might have stayed there if I didn’t need to breathe.” Jack is rooted in guilt and so grounded that he believes he must continue to dwell in his muck and mire and the spiritual cleansing is vitiated.
Busch has expertly crafted and re-crafted North is such smooth and seamless prose that readers forget they are reading so there isn’t a sense of the artist/writer/creator’s giddy hand manipulating his characters behind the scenes through thin rehashed plotlines. All 302 pages sing and shine with power, beauty and a cinematic driving story that it is book more worthy than the $24.95 listed price.

Lee Gooden 5-20-2005


AN INTERVIEW WITH FREDERICK BUSCH

I-First of all I want to say how much of an honor and a privilege it is to speak with you.

F.B.-Thank you

I- You’re welcome. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

F.B-I’ve always wrote. I remember even at 7 and 8 years old writing poems and stories. But what I remember best was that my fourth grade teacher hated me…until I wrote a poem that made her and other people look at me differently. I liked that…I still do.

I-What are your influences, who do you like and read, classic and contemporary?

F.B-I love Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and many others in the classics. Contemporary, I enjoy Alice Munro, Leslie Epstine, Howard Norman, especially his book, the Bird Artist, Reginald Mcknight, Adam Thorpe and many others.

I-Why did you write North? What made you go back to Jack as a subject of a book?

F.B-I wrote North because I missed writing in Jack’s voice and admired the hell out of him because he is a good man that tries to take responsibility for his actions and the actions of others regardless of the consequences. Through his Jack’s voice I made a good story. Jack is a good story.


I-Do you have a routine you follow as a writer or a specific place you write?

F.B.-I’ve been luck enough that I could quit working as a teacher and write full time. I write mostly in the mornings and my study is on the second floor of our renovated barn.

I-How do you start a novel?

F.B.-I start with a character first. A strong character is the core of my books, Jack, for example is man that works hard at being a good person. If I hadn’t fleshed him out and made him real to me and just started out with an idea and threw him in there in a ‘what-if’ situation he would be like a cardboard cut-out that I moved around on a board to suit my purpose. If he isn’t real to me, then he won’t be real to the reader.

I-When you write do you do a lot of drafts or does your prose easily flow?

F.B.-I don’t always get it right the first time around, but that’s all right because the art of writing is a craft that I practice full time and there is always revision, revision and revision. When I think I’ve got it down right, then I go through my work and look for connections and ongoing themes. I polish my writing and keep polishing it until I’m positive that it is my best. Of course, nobody is perfect.

I-Do you do a lot of research or do you just wing it?

F.B.-I research and research extensively.

I-Will there be anymore books about Jack?

F.B.-I don’t think so, right now I have a rough draft of a book of short stories ready to go and I’m writing a novel that takes place in Maine, which funny enough is where Jack was heading at the end of North.

I-Thank you Mr. Busch.

F.B.-You’re welcome.