Customer Reviews

Harry and Catherine: A Love Story

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Busch is obviously a good writer, and, to be fair, I haven't finished this book as yet...
The trio, Harry, Catherine and Carter talk and talk and talk without advancing the plot very much. This is , more or less, a mood and character piece. However the characters whine and complain constantly. I'm pushing through it, however. I realize there are some people who love this book. So maybe it's just not my cup of tea, as it were.
If you weren't crazy about "The Corrections" from-aside from the marvelous use of language-you'll see where I'm coming from.

Some books can stand the test of time, but Harry and Catherine, published in 1990, has a dated feel about it and that made the story less believable from a 2010 point of view.

Harry, Catherine and Carter, members of this grown-up love triangle, are only in their early forties, hardly old by today's standards.

I found it difficult to like Catherine, who was busy trying to show how she could handle the cold upstate NY winters on her own. And something prevented me from understanding what kind of great love Harry and Catherine shared in the past. It was hard to get to know these characters. I thought Carter's character was the most believable and cheered for him.

The conflict of commercial development versus keeping our countryside beautiful, with the additional layer of the black cemetery being unearthed and moved seemed contrived, or maybe that too was just dated.

But in the end, I thought the final chapters were the best and I enjoyed the references to upstate NY. Likewise, the garden discussions and cooking references made me want to go out into my own garden and pull together a good meal.

If you crave traditional, standard sorts of love stories - you know what I mean, the Elvis formula flick kinda thing: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back - then this book will simply exasperate you. But if you do crave that formula crap, then you don't deserve Harry & Catherine. I first read this book more than ten years ago, and I remember I thought about it for weeks after I finished it. Catherine Hollander is possibly one of the strongest women I've met in modern fiction. She is also, as I said, exasperating and, at times, none too likeable. But the truth is, Catherine is probably like a lot of women in this age of nearly forced equality. She values her independence to a fault. She needs her "personal space" so much that she seems thorny and unapproachable, or even indifferent, to the men who love her - or try to. Harry, on the other hand, is simply a man in love, a man who keeps on trying, on and off, for literally years to understand how to please this woman. Like most men, he's not terribly complicated. He may even be Everyman. Even at the end of this book, you're not quite sure whether these two will make it, but in Harry & Catherine, Frederick Busch has created some very memorable characters. Even the secondary players are carefully developed into real and very believable characters - the two teenage sons, the jilted lover Carter, the chubby sex-tinged temptress Olivia. There is heartbreak and humor in this story and there is also gritty graphic sex of all sorts, as well as a strange juxtaposition: a parallel theme of the importance and sacredness of family. (It would make a terrific film.) I found that I was just as mystified and charmed by this book in 2009 as I was the first time I read it in the 1990s. I have read several of Busch's other books too - all excellent (GIRLS is my favorite). But here's the oddest thing I felt as I finished reading this book again: I miss Fred Busch. He died three years ago this month. I never met the guy, but I felt an overwhelming sense of loss as I closed this book last night. Yes, I miss him. - Tim Bazzett, author of the Reed City Boy Trilogy

This took a long time to get me interested; I even put it down and read two books and then tried again.

I had a feeling throughout that Harry and the author were one and the same. Almost like Harry didn't have to be fully fleshed out, as a character, in order for the author to understand him. On the other hand, the rest of the characters were pretty weak too.

I liked Harry, as much as he was, and Catherine was ok, but probably not someone I'd seek out. Carter was dreadful. I couldn't stand the grubby, grabby pretender that he seemed to be. When he behaved well, I was surprised. When he behaved as he normally did, I was repelled. The kids were minor characters, and not very real or true. The relationships to each other were thin and lacking in depth.

Gardeners might like Catherine's garden and cooks might like her meals. Wood choppers will wonder why she was chopping wood on the concrete floor of her barn and why she didn't dislocate her shoulder when she hit the floor with her axe. Liberals will laugh to hear themselves discussed so blatently negatively. Women will wonder about some people's attitudes toward sex.

-------- ... then catherine came in, reminding him that sometimes you make the trip, that's all; you just, sometimes, GO there. Because she stood in a doorway, tough-looking in her jeans and sandals and old chambray shirt - he thought he remembered its blueness on the clothesline - with her hair cut shorter . . .

frederic busch, professor of literature, includes every lit-school technique to get you/me to identify with harry or catherine...

i, of course, identified with harry: slightly porky, writer, reflective, not adolescent, still lustful . . . still romantic . . .

"harry &..." echoes american family and speech as faithfully as "Plainsong" (Haruf) chants the midwest . . .

heartbreaking/heartfilling !

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