Frederick Busch

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Review of Closing Arguments

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SOURCE: Fortuna, Diane. Review of Closing Arguments, by Frederick Busch. America 166, no. 3 (1 February 1992): 67-8.

[In the following review, Fortuna comments on what she considers Busch's adept handling of the moral ambiguity of the modern era in Closing Arguments.]

Perhaps the last years of a century always produce a cultural perception of decadence and chaos. At the turn of the 20th century, diminutive Henry Adams, it is said, walked up and down the halls of Congress shaking his head and complaining that the country was going to the dogs. In our own time, fin-de-siècle despair seems augmented by millenial jitters. Violence, perverse sexuality and corruption, it would seem, are rotting America, its government, its laws and their enforcement. In Frederick Busch's court-room thriller, Closing Arguments, this sense of moral bankruptcy amounts to an indictment of the United States: duplicity during the Vietnam War; corruptible legal system; institutional and family violence, and salacious marital and extra-marital deceptions. Like Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, Busch's lawyer, Mark Brennan, is married, flawed and believable; unlike Turow, Busch presents his character as the fragile consciousness bombarded by all the stresses of the post-Vietnam era.

The novel consists of the testimony of Brennan, an upstate New York lawyer who is haunted by recollections of his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. Those memories—of torture and humiliation at the hands of his captors—constantly surface as Brennan prepares a pro bono case in which he defends a woman who has murdered her partner during “rough sex.” Directly addressed, the reader becomes both judge and jury as Brennan obsessively and predictably becomes his client's next lover. Who should the reader judge—the murderess or the lawyer who becomes involved with her?

All this seems standard enough. But Frederick Busch has broken through the boundaries of courtroom dramas. Busch, professor of literature at Colgate University, is a prolific writer. He is author of 13 domestic novels, three collections of short stories and two works of non-fiction, but none are as compelling as his latest work, Closing Arguments. It is an experimental novel in its pained and self-conscious narrator and in its demands upon the reader's participation. Not a lawyer, Busch has included as part of Brennan's consciousness references to recent sensational trials involving everything from child abuse to mass murders to the Chambers case. Not a veteran of a foreign war, he was written the most powerful scenes of aerial combat since Catch-22 and has created a character as haunted as Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim. The interrogation scenes set in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp are all but explosive.

All good novels work by surprise. In Closing Arguments, the plot takes more turns than a country road; the style is bare, time jumps without transitions from the prisoner-of-war camp to the present and back again to Vietnam. Chapters are mere vignettes, usually short and entitled ironically to indicate the fragmentation of Brennan's personal and professional life. His wife, out of sheer loneliness, is having an affair, his 16-year-old son has been using cocaine and his daughter may have been exposed to AIDS. “Life, ordinary life,” Brennan shouts during the murder trial, “can feel like combat. …” This impassioned cry is the core of the book, and Busch repeatedly uses the experience of Vietnam as myth and counterpoint to Brennan's current confusion. After his escape from the internment camp, an American intelligence officer advises Brennan to tell the truth. “Which truth?” Brennan asks. “Our truth,” the debriefing officer replies. In like manner, years later, Brennan advises his client, “When we figure out what truth we're telling, then we'll work on how to tell somebody that particular truth.”

The author implies that relative truths are symptoms of the ethical wasteland that America has become. But Frederick Busch is neither polemicist nor moralist. In Closing Arguments, some readers may fault him for offering no solutions. Others may find the explicit sex scenes offensive, but they are integral to the atmosphere of corruption and violence that the novel presents as a whole. Despite these possible objections, Busch has written an eminently readable, suspenseful thriller. It has all the elements of “Hollywood”: sex, violence, war, post-traumatic combat stress, legal sensationalism. But it is also a finely crafted and haunting psychological and social novel.

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