The Review of Contemporary Fiction

War Babies by Frederick Busch
Alan Tinkler

Frederick Busch. War Babies. New Directions, 2001. 114 pp. Paper: $12.95.

During Frederick Busch’s prolific career, there have been some notable gems, including War Babies, first published in 1989. War Babies, like his superb early novel Manual Labor, is about the tenuousness of identity. An American, Peter Santore, travels to Salisbury to confront his father’s past by finding Hilary Pennels, the daughter of an English war hero who died in a Korean POW camp. Peter’s father, who survived the conflict by turning traitor, may have been responsible in some measure for Pennels’s death. Peter, the narrator, explains his mission: “It had always been simply to be in the same town as the child of the hero of a moment during which my father had distinguished himself by turning coat.” The simplicity of this symmetry underscores the difficulty of resolving the past, as the past refuses to be so readily contained. While Santore joined the Peace Fighters on his own volition, Pennels ordered his men to join so they would gain access to food and medical supplies. After ordering his men to join, however, Pennels remained behind, and during the interrogation that followed, at which Santore may have been present, Pennels died. While Peter attempts to cope with his traitorous father, Hilary is burdened with her father’s heroism. His heroism, she claims, was more important to him than his family, and now she is marked by a father she knows only through the narratives provided by her father’s sergeant-major, whom Hilary admits “lives more in 1951 in Korea than he does here or the present.” Even as the novel attempts to resolve itself around Hilary’s claim that “[w]e have a right, both of us, to live our own lives,” the novel commendably avoids closure as the past inextricably remains an active component of the present. War Babies is Frederick Busch at his best. [Alan Tinkler]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction War Babies by Frederick Busch Alan Tinkler Frederick Busch. War Babies. New Directions, 2001. 114 pp. Paper: $12.95. During Frederick Busch’s prolific career, there have been some notable gems, including War Babies, first published in 1989. War Babies, like his superb early novel Manual Labor, is about the tenuousness of identity. An American, Peter Santore, travels to Salisbury to confront his father’s past by finding Hilary Pennels, the daughter of an English war hero who died in a Korean POW camp. Peter’s father, who survived the conflict by turning traitor, may have been responsible in some measure for Pennels’s death. Peter, the narrator, explains his mission: “It had always been simply to be in the same town as the child of the hero of a moment during which my father had distinguished himself by turning coat.” The simplicity of this symmetry underscores the difficulty of resolving the past, as the past refuses to be so readily contained. While Santore joined the Peace Fighters on his own volition, Pennels ordered his men to join so they would gain access to food and medical supplies. After ordering his men to join, however, Pennels remained behind, and during the interrogation that followed, at which Santore may have been present, Pennels died. While Peter attempts to cope with his traitorous father, Hilary is burdened with her father’s heroism. His heroism, she claims, was more important to him than his family, and now she is marked by a father she knows only through the narratives provided by her father’s sergeant-major, whom Hilary admits “lives more in 1951 in Korea than he does here or the present.” Even as the novel attempts to resolve itself around Hilary’s claim that “[w]e have a right, both of us, to live our own lives,” the novel commendably avoids closure as the past inextricably remains an active component of the present. War Babies is Frederick Busch at his best. [Alan Tinkler]

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