North: A Novel - Hardcover

Busch, Frederick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039305103X ISBN 13: 9780393051032

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005

Synopsis

A taut, dark, psychological page-turner from the best-selling author of Girls.

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."

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

The Washington Post notes that "Dashiell Hammett’s fingerprints are easy to spot" in Busch’s latest effort. The author knows how to stylize dialogue, pace a scene, unfold a story, and, of course, introduce the treacherous woman—and make it all seem familiar and surprising at the same time. The tortured Jack, "part hard-boiled detective and part tragic hero," (Washington Post) captivated all critics’ imaginations with his introspective meditation on his own life. After all, in order to save a life he must relive his past. But can returning to the scene of past crimes offer salvation? North is not as suspenseful as you might hope, but it seems that’s not the point.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Talk about your demons. This man Jack has got demons. Big, bad, dark, implacable, 24/7 demons. He has been around a while, loping through a couple of very fine novels: Girls, published in 1997, and now North, both from renowned story craftsman Frederick Busch. The demons don't seem to be mellowing with age. Thankfully, neither does Jack.

Having failed at just about everything, most particularly at being a father, a husband and a cop, Jack has fled his native turf in upstate New York and gone to ground on the Carolina coast, where he's found himself a dead-end job as a bouncer at a beach resort. He is, as he notes sardonically, "climbing slowly down the ladder of police work."

Enter the classy brunette. Merle Davidoff, Manhattan attorney, pushing six feet, with a slightly crooked nose, turns up at Jack's place of employment and promptly requires rescuing. Jack obliges, seemingly from force of habit. One thing leads to the next, the way things do. Over coffee and sour mash, Merle pitches a rescue offer of her own: She wants to hire Jack to track down her errant nephew, a ne'er-do-well in his late twenties, last seen in the company of some heavy-duty characters back up north. He might be okay. But you get the feeling that he is not. You get the feeling that this job will be no simple gumshoe affair, and that Merle is, like a proper film noir heroine, trouble with a capital T.

It goes without saying that Jack takes the case. And that the case will turn out to be tougher and more painful than anything he bargained for. And that, when he points his aging pickup north on I-95, bound for New York, he will find himself on a collision course not only with his destiny but also with his past.

Enter the demons. Dead wife, dead child, severed friendships, unpaid emotional debts. Conflicts never settled. A corpse never found. Questions never answered. Questions never asked. The trail of the missing nephew leads Jack right back to a landscape he hoped to have put behind him forever: the worn-down, unlovable countryside a few hours north of New York City, familiar to readers of Girls and also, according to Jack, to readers of James Fenimore Cooper.

"This was a part of the state known for not very much. . . . It was rough country. It was as battered-looking as the worst I had seen of New England. It was more scoured out by poverty. It was some of what made them crazy up there. The brutal winters were part of it too. I knew that. People there kept a distance from each other. That used to comfort me."

Cut to the present. Jack looks for a base camp for the coming manhunt.

A dowdy real estate agent gives him a few addresses. " 'We don't usually send the renters off on their own,' she said.

" 'But I have an honest face?'

". . . 'Well, you've got a face. I'll give you that.' "

Dashiell Hammett's fingerprints are easy to spot here. The narrative, the dialogue, the pacing of a scene can be as stylized as anything that ever passed between Bogie and Bacall. But a closer look reveals something more postmodern, a kind of knowingness shared by author and reader. We know what kind of story this is, we think; but then no, maybe we don't. Sometimes Busch's fictional world seems oddly familiar, in mood or mise-en-scène if not in detailed topography. At other times it is wholly unmapped terrain, full of surprises, most of them grim, some nightmarish.

Jack is an irresistible protagonist, a walking train wreck of a man from whom you can't turn away your eyes. He is part hard-boiled detective and part tragic hero, limping blindly toward some unforeseeable fate. North is by turns a thriller, a morality play, a lengthy interior monologue, a plunge into the psychological abyss.

It's also a damn good book. Not the sort of thing, perhaps, that keeps you awake all night, flipping the pages: Many readers will find it too intense, and too saddening, for that. But the sort that gets you quickly in its grip and keeps you there, hanging on for the ride until the final secret is revealed. And then wishing there were just a few pages more.

Reviewed by Richard Grant
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

With a particular sense of landscape and of the rhythms of rural life, Busch (A Memory of War, etc.) once again maps out his home territory, upstate New York, in this hybrid of a somber literary novel and hard-boiled detective story. This follow-up to his 1997 novel, Girls, centers on Jack, an emotionally scarred security guard, who meets a woman on the Carolina coast and agrees to search for her missing ne'er-do-well nephew. The young man has conveniently disappeared in Vienna, N.Y., the very site of Jack's former troubles. Jack follows the trail upstate, where encounters with a dope farmer and a parasitic, sexually voracious reporter ensue. Constant flashbacks to the events of Girls—Jack's divorce, the death of his child and the search for another missing girl—are meant to up the emotional ante, but instead mire what should be a page-turner in the past. And while Busch combines the conventions of prurient sex and graphic violence with accomplished description and characterization, he sacrifices suspense and pacing in the process of straddling two genres. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Once a respected cop, Jack now works as a bouncer in a coastal North Carolina bar where a chance encounter with a sexy New York City lawyer sends him back to his hometown in upstate New York in search of her missing nephew, a disaffected youth whom she suspects has become mixed up with "the wrong people." As Jack prowls the surprising criminal underbelly of the tranquil backwater town he once knew so well, he uncovers more than the clues to Tyler's whereabouts. Jack is traversing nothing less than the very ground where his own life fell apart years before, and the demons he encounters are legion. There's the death of his infant daughter, the subsequent divorce from his wife, her eventual suicide, and an unsolved case involving another missing child that nearly paralyzes Jack with an ominous foreboding. Riveting and incisive, the tension vibrantly builds at a relentless, thrumming pace as Jack confronts dangers both real and imagined in veteran novelist Busch's electrifying psychological thriller. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039305103X
• ISBN 13: 9780393051032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320