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Busch’s stealthy stories can devastate
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Imagine the writer as a wager of war. Some stun with shock-and-awe prose, surprise plot twists, barrages of literary ordnance. Others deploy steady blasts of sentiment, turning heartstrings into so many tripwires. But some conduct a subtler campaign, built on stealth maneuvers: escalating schemes, deft and imperceptible, that quietly, thrillingly, devastate. Frederick Busch, the author of more than two dozen books, who died in 2006 at the age of 64, was a master of this approach.
A far more reductive way to say this is to call Busch, as many did, a minimalist — a label often resented by those to whom it’s applied. That term does nothing to convey the finely calibrated artistry in evidence here, or the ways Busch differed from other writers tagged with the same label. It would be wise, then, to set aside the label and consider Busch on his own terms. His stories hum with sorrow, quake with wit, exude a rare magnitude of compassion even as they force his readers to face unsettling truths. They deal in significant moments — of cruelty, frequently, or of belated understanding — and feature voices attempting to speak across a divide, almost always failing. The best of Busch’s stories read like sneak attacks, loping along with their easy diction and commonplace settings, then landing a late-in-the-game emotional wallop that makes the reader reframe everything that’s come before. You thought you were on a lazy stroll, but you turn out to have been walking through a minefield.
“Widow Water,” for example, is ostensibly concerned with the repair of a sump pump at the home of a young college professor in upstate New York. But you need look no further than its first lines to suspect that much more is at stake. “What to know about pain,” Busch’s narrator declares, “is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose. I’m a plumber. I dig for what’s wrong. I should know.” He arrives at the house and charms the professor’s three-year-old son, Mac. Soon the boy is underfoot, curious about the work at hand. When he gets in the way one too many times, his father loses patience and strikes him. The plumber doesn’t react. The scene doesn’t waver. The men placidly discuss a clogged filter as Mac weeps nearby. But as the narrator leaves, he whispers, strangely, kindly, to the boy, “What shall we do with your Daddy?” Mac is last seen sucking his sleeve on the cellar steps, confused and hurt, unable to leave his father’s side.
Many of these stories center on malfunctions of manhood. The young professor has already bungled an attempt to make the repair, and he keeps cursing his own ineptitude.
When he strikes the child, he appears to be additionally wounded by the child’s interest in a more capable man, ashamed of his own impotence.
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