Overview

"Combining the pace of a detective story with the bold prose of a master storyteller, North is both an adventure and a pilgrimage. Alone and haunted by memories of his dead wife and child, Jack?who prowled the backwaters of Girls?returns to upstate New York from the Carolina coast, where he has been working as a security guard. A New York lawyer hires him to find her missing nephew, last seen in the area of Jack's northern hometown. His search gradually uncovers a dark underside of rural life and a cast of dangerous characters. Jack is besieged by memories as he uncovers a brutal crime and finds himself in a turbulent relationship with a treacherous woman. In trying to save another's life, Jack must relive his own; memory, obsession, and reality fuse; and Jack discovers the truth of Faulkner's observation that ""the past is not really past; it's not even over."""

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Reviews

The search for a missing youth jump-starts Busch's brooding latest, a loose sequel to his 1997 stunner, Girls. Jack, the itinerant security guard who appears in Girls and (otherwise named) in the earlier short story Ralph the Duck, is drawn away from his latest gig at a Carolina resort by a request from Manhattan attorney Merle Davidoff: to find her vagrant nephew Tyler Pearl, an inveterate gambler last seen in an upstate New York area Jack knows all too well. Returning to the hamlet of Vienna, where, years before, he and local police had failed to locate the body of a murdered girl, Jack surrenders again to his obsessive fixation with kids gone missing and kids gone dead -an obsession magnified by the deaths of his own wife and daughter, and the burden of guilt that surrounds those losses. Reconnecting with black state trooper Elway Bird, who's now dying of leukemia, and Elway's wife Sarah (with whom Jack has a more intimate history), he gradually uncovers evidence of dope farming and learns all he needs to know and more about transplanted Vermonter Clarence Smith and seductive rich-girl freelance journalist Georgia Bromell, as the story moves toward a violent climax, another bitter loss and a (painfully unconvincing) flurry of reconciliations and promises. North, which resembles a Ross McDonald mystery more closely than anything else Busch has written, is well worth reading: it's filled with potent atmospheric effects, wrenching dialogue, and a sure sense of its middle-aged protagonist's weary apprehension of the facts of his limits and his mortality. But it's weakened by Jack's genre-mannered narrator's voice, and a thudding overemphasis on the theme from which Busch can't seem to free himself: that life is brutal and dangerous, and we cannot protect our loved ones from its ravages. We've heard it all before, in earlier, better books. This writer's failures are indeed more interesting than many of his contemporaries' successes. Still, North is a disappointment. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Frederick Busch (1941–2006) was the recipient of many honors, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, a National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award. The prolific author of sixteen novels and six collections of short stories, Busch is renowned for his writing’s emotional nuance and minimal, plainspoken style. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lived most of his life in upstate New York, where he worked for forty years as a professor at Colgate University.

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