The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Girls by Frederick BushJeanne Claire van Ryzin
Frederick Bush. Girls. Harmony Books, 1997. 288 pp. $23.00.
“You can’t say once upon a time to tell the story of how we got where we are,” says Jack, a forty-two-year-old security guard at a tony private college in a small upstate New York town and narrator of Girls, Busch’s eighteenth work of fiction. “You have to say winter. Once, in winter, you say, because winter was our only season, and it felt like we would live in winter all our lives.”
Jack and his wife Fanny are caught in a frozen marriage and wintry emotional life, numbed by the loss of their infant daughter years ago. Emotionally adrift yet also fledgingly pursuing a means to emerge from the iciness that permeates his life, Jack throws himself into the search for a missing fourteen-year-old girl, the seemingly perfect daughter of a minister and his wife from a nearby town. Busch documents his characters’ emotional disenfranchisment and at the same time deftly utilizes the details of the harsh upstate winter to echo their dormant lives.
Busch’s prose is a masterly combination of intensity, delicacy, and sparseness which, combined, yield an elegant work only a truly estimable writer could produce. By deftly blending characteristics of the hard-boiled detective novel with a powerful intelligence, tenderness, and complexity, Busch renders a novel that is at once something of a literary thriller as well as a cogent and compassionate tale of guilt and the all too human urge to both flee from and resolve the past. [Jeanne Claire van Ryzin]