Customer Reviews

Don't Tell Anyone

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This collection of sixteen short stories and a novella is yet another first-rate effort by Frederick Busch. His characters have the kind of humanity that make them seem deeply real, with lives so flawlessly imagined that you can be swept away by them. Even if the short stories weren't so good (and believe me, they are excellent), it would be worth reading this book just for the novella "A Handbook for Spies." The longer format allows Busch to delve more thoroughly into his subject matter and characters, thus expanding the protagonist Willie's life in a way not possible in a short story. We are treated to Willie's loves, his fears, his peculiar relationship with his Holocaust survivor parents and their peculiar relationship, and what it all means to a man who escaped service in the Vietnam War.

Busch writes the kind of dialogue you might wish you encountered in your own conversations: sharp, witty, wise, intriguing. His language is impeccable, with descriptions so memorable I sometimes stopped reading in admiration, to savor the words. Busch can be as funny as he can be melancholy, and every last story in this book has tremendous emotional range.

[Note: This review was originally published October 15, 2000, in the Seattle Times ...

For a volume thick with stories, "Don't Tell Anyone" is a quietly ironic title. The characters talk -- to friends or strangers, to themselves, even to ghosts -- trying to make sense of things and relieve their isolation. Like the protagonist in the opening story, "Heads," the characters throughout Frederick Busch's 20th book of fiction are filled with "half-remembered words, tatters of statement, halves of stories, the litter of alibis, confessions, supplications, and demand."

Talking sometimes closes more doors than it opens, or taps into buried rages that erupt in threats of violence. As if improved expression could solve the problem, characters correct their own and each other's phrasing. But language has a life of its own, confusing and concealing even when a speaker is being careful or terribly honest, and what one tells oneself can be the most treacherous story of all. The title urges silence for strong reasons. Yet secrets cut the characters off from people they love, as well as from themselves.

Busch's world is problematic, but his stories awaken deep joy in the reader. In the gorgeous, heart-rending story "Malvasia," a woman brings all sorts of comforts to her recently widowed father, who wants nothing except to believe that when night falls his wife will greet him in the room they used to share. In "Timberline," the narrator's flashback to a dangerous hike with his father won't let the reader go, and this memory is only one dimension of his gripping present crisis. Some of an old man's haunting, half-realized wisdom in "Machias" comes from once having held together a broken telephone wire in a blizzard, so that a doctor could be called to help birth a baby. In the old man's recollection, the message passed through his veins.

Most of the stories are about the things that happen to everyone -- a love lost, a child in trouble, a parent understood -- but that never come with directions or guiding principles attached. The rules and regulations of bureaucracies, on the other hand, are plentiful.

In "The Baby in the Box," the legislature controls the police department budget, so the hapless and terrified night dispatcher at the station, Ivanhoe Krisp, is the only person available when a midnight caller says a newborn was left in a dumpster. Our hero has to ride a poorly maintained, not-at-all-trusty SUV through the darkness to the rescue, and his wrenching question at the end ("Who  would throw a person away?") won't be answered by any bureaucrat.

Nor, apparently, by any God. The book's title could be a mischievous deity's instructions to the universe: Don't tell anyone what things mean. Don't even tell people who they are. Is Krisp a hero like the great Scots warrior Ivanhoe, or just a flaky snack for the hungry night? When the narrator in "Timberline" has an amazing conversation with a stranger, has his life changed, or hasn't it? "Nobody tells him which."

Sometimes knowledge arrives, although in bizarre forms. In "Bob's Your Uncle" a psychotic young man ("wily and odd-looking, very large and a little arrested-sounding, and coated with the grime of the world") drops in on long-ago friends of his parents and won't leave. His misery and menace become a coded message to the host about himself.

Busch's understanding and compassion are generous and energetic. So is his fascination with how life goes wrong and how irrationally, impossibly, we keep trying to make things right. Each of his very different characters speaks in a unique yet natural voice. His plots move like good horses with expert riders -- a touch here, a subtle shift of weight there -- through dauntingly broken terrain. His phrasing is often brilliant; his syntax does effortless heavy lifting; his humor is a constant, unexpected grace and delight.

"Don't Tell Anyone" is a hugely satisfying book, and its author (this isn't news, but do tell everyone) is a genius of a storyteller.

In this book, Frederick Busch once again shows an incredible mastery of the short story as a vehicle to convey the deepest and most intimate personal feelings, even through the ephemeral nature of a short story as opposed to a novel. Yet, Busch has a talent shown by only a few present day short story writers. His ability to convey human feeling and emotion with the most elegant constructions is clearly demonstrated with this collection.

The intensity with which Busch presents his emotionality is enhanced by his incredibly insightful portrayal of the processes of the human mind. His stories are so rich with the deepest of our hidden thoughts that they become almost palpable. In these stories, Busch portrays highly intelligent people working with personal intimacies that are highly personal, yet so universal at the same time.

Particularly attractive is his "novella" in the book, "Handbook For Spies." Not only is the story captivatingly well written, but it is a virtual social commentary beyond the basics of the plot he lays out. In addition, his implication seems to be, that in one way or another, we are all 'spies' in some sense or another, or at least we act like them. In an editorial moment, his comment that Philip Roth is "careless about his character's lives ... he's frivolous about them..." portrays an unusually striking ability for Busch to develop his characters in a more mature emotional manner than he feels that Roth does.

Any person who enjoys the short story genre will not be disappointed by this book by Busch. For those with a high level of sensitivity toward human introspection, this book is a true revelation.

This is the second book that I have read by Busch. The first was Girls, and that was a while ago. (I'm actually a little curious to reread it now, since I have the feeling that the plot would speak to me more strongly these days.)

Don't Tell Anyone reminded me, in a way, of A Multitude of Sins, by Richard Ford. The thematic connection between the stories in Busch's book are not so obvious, but it still had the feeling for me of a meditation on a theme.

My trouble is that I'm not exactly sure what the theme is-- something about love and missed connections. Something about the things that you see and don't see in family members. There is something specific about parents and their children and the way the madness and guilt eat into the relationships, although that makes it sound more overt than it actually is written. There is a lot about infidelity and alienation of affection, although this mostly seems to be the result of missed connections and broken moments than the subject as such.

Busch writes a mean short story. Personally, I got much more out of the stories than I did from the novella at the end ("A Handbook for Spies"). I don't think that this is because the novella is particularly weak, more that I had the feeling that his strengths as a writer are most vividly highlighted in the shorter works. "Joy of Cooking" was probably my favorite, for reasons that I certainly subjective. For me, Busch's main strength is the ability to strike a glancing blow on very big topics. He doesn't go after his subjects with an elephant gun, knowing that a needle will do more than well enough.

Any suggestions as to where I should read next in his body of work?