Frederick Busch

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Not Quite Dickensian

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The subject of Frederick Busch's intelligent, careful, often brilliant, but inert novel ["The Mutual Friend"] is Charles Dickens, the driven dying Dickens of 1867–70 as summoned up by Dolby, his tour manager and companion, as he himself is dying 30 years later, a charity case in a Fulham hospital….

It is a serious and scrupulous fiction Mr. Busch has concocted…. There are no elaborate set pieces of Victoriana, no huggermugger "vivid sights and sounds" where we might expect to find Oliver Twist or Pip walking down the street. Nor does Mr. Busch attempt to do a version of the Victorian novel, à la "The French Lieutenant's Woman." This is a contemporary American novel, written by a man who once wrote a book about John Hawkes….

The most striking positive virtue of "The Mutual Friend" is Mr. Busch's way with Dickens's voice, as speaker and occasional narrator. For Mr. Busch to try to make Dickens speak just as he wrote would have been folly, because that would make Mr. Busch both a competitor and a writer of pastiche. But it would have been equally foolish to have tried to imagine Dickens speaking in a way that had nothing to do with the way he wrote. It is a ticklish task, and on the whole Mr. Busch handles it admirably.

Roger Sale, "Not Quite Dickensian," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1978 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), April 9, 1978, p. 10.

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Nicholas Delbanco