My favorite piece in this collection of expert stories [Don't Tell Anyone] is the last one, a mid-length novella entitled “A Handbook for Spies.” Willie Bernstein is an English instructor in upstate New York in the '60s. He is dodging the draft and trying to figure out who he is, so hapless that he doesn't even know that his instructor status is itself a draft deferment; he doesn't need another.

Into his life walks the daughter of one of the full professors. Tanya Fevler—who calls herself Tony—is “two years younger than Willie, and a century more experienced.” She is also the wife of a Vietnam vet whom she claims has been horribly disfigured, though there's plenty she's not telling. Prof. Fevler keeps calling his daughter damaged and disturbed, but she comes across as a domineering woman, fond of power games and public sex. She overwhelms Willie and becomes the center of his life.

Behind this episode is the issue of antisemitism, which keeps emerging in bits of dialogue. Behind it also is a subplot—which soon becomes the main one—about Willie's parents, who had fled Nazi-occupied France as a young couple. Willie's father, an urbane Manhattan lawyer, has implied to his wife that he's doing some kind of work for the government, but Willie suspects—rightly, it turns out—that he's just stepping out on her. Etienne Bernstein eventually leaves his wife, and winds up as a country lawyer in Lubec, Maine.

Willie visits his father there years after the story's opening. Etienne admits he betrayed his wife but seems more interested in the secrecy of the situation, which reflects Tony's secrecy with Willie. We realize as the man speaks that we're at the thematic heart of the novella.

“This, I think, is how it works, the secret life,” the father explains. “You do not wish to tell, so you tiptoe around like a drunk waiter, going from person to person. You whisper into their face, and they smell the wine on your breath. Don't tell anyone, you beg them.” That is what this whole collection is really about, the secrets we keep from each other but are telling with every breath, every gesture. The publicity material accompanying the book makes a comparison with Raymond Carver, and normally I ignore such hype, but in this case there's something to it. Busch's language is richer, and his technique more subtle, but he shares Carver's empathy for characters in even the most sordid situation. He doesn't stand back and judge them. He's right there with them.

The collection purports to be about the American family, but it is very much a postmodern family. There is, for example, the story in which the father who ruined his life with drugs and an illicit affair encounters his grown daughter, who mentions casually that she has an out-of-wedlock child (and lends the old man a couple of hundred bucks). That is my favorite of the shorter works here, “The Ninth, in E Minor,” a simple but poignant piece about people admitting their failures.

The news isn't all grim. “The Baby in the Box” is one of the funniest stories I've ever read, about a police dispatcher who goes on a heroic quest to help some women who found a baby in a Dumpster. And “Laying the Ghost,” believe it or not, is a comic story about a man being told he's fatally ill. The doctor in the case has some history with his patient; the man once humiliated him in front of his wife. At the same time, the doctor's partner is firing their alcoholic nurse—each man chooses the job he wants—so we're hearing the genuine, heartfelt wail of the patient, which tears at us, when in walks the tipsy, disgruntled nurse. “It's because I'm not a slender woman, isn't it?” she says. “It's a form of persecution. I'm an ample sized woman, and I never had a hope here. And you knew it, you pious citizen bastards.” You can't help laughing. Even the dying man smiles.

Busch sometimes annoys me with his virtuoso openings, as if he's trying to wow creative writing students with how much he can cram into a single paragraph. And occasional stretches of dialogue seem pretty on the page but nothing a human being would say. For the most part, though, these are expert stories by one of our finest fiction writers, about the secrets that we can't help telling: Our whole lives tell them.