Not many American authors make a career of writing about adult love. The vagaries of youth seem more popular, sweetly sad accounts of how the indifferent world, or war, or family, or life itself trips up the first, tentative steps toward passion and commitment. But for Frederick Busch the dilemmas of middle age are the heart of fiction, the complex material that the writer shapes in order to show how most of us live our lives. Busch is interested not in the cliché of the star-crossed lover but in the little tensions of the quotidian, the apparently insignificant slips and slides of the daily routine that eventually cause trouble in the kitchen, heartache in bed. His people talk; in some of the most thoughtful dialogue written today, they talk about mundane issues that impinge on adult love.

Lately more readers have been listening. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Invisible Mending in 1984 and of the Award in Literature from the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986, Busch has published fourteen books of fiction since 1971. The latest two, War Babies (1989) and Harry and Catherine (1990), confirm what is now a celebrated career. Harry and Catherine have intrigued Busch for nearly two decades. They first appeared in his work in 1976; in Domestic Particulars (where, by the way, Catherine is spelled with a K), they are strangely lonely lovers on the edge of middle age: sullen Harry watches his weight and clings to Katherine in order to break out of his isolation, while independent Katherine raises her boys and resents Harry's intrusion, even though she loves him. Eight years later with the short story “The News” (Too Late American Boyhood Blues, 1984), Busch caught up once more with his sporadically separated couple and listened as they tried to talk their way back toward love. In Harry and Catherine he reunites these absent friends in an impressive account of the difficulties of adult relationships.

Picking up Busch's latest novel, readers familiar with his achievement will recall Harry and Catherine's effort to touch one another in “The News.” Very much aware that Harry both longs for family and looks for love, Katherine tells him—with patience and care—that she is a divorced woman, that she does not want “to get married anymore.” Harry's response sets the tone for Busch's chronicling of their long-standing affair in the novel: “I'm really not the kind of man that a lot of women live with. Marry. Get old with. Die next to.” This self-awareness does not help him; although he knows the hardness of the truth, he prefers the promise of the lie. In Harry and Catherine he returns to Catherine to “get old with.”

He does not succeed. What concerns Busch is not the inevitability of the failure but the stubbornness of the pursuit, the sheer need to make contact with the people who matter in one's life. The delicacy of the need, the way it shows itself in the little moments of the day, is established in the opening pages: Catherine, long divorced and confidently skilled at raising her teenaged boys, looks at her son's cheek and wonders who taught him how to shave. Not her former husband—he has been gone fourteen years. Not the other men in her life—none of them stayed long enough to get that close to the boys. So it had to be Harry. When Harry phones to say that he is “in the neighborhood,” Busch sets in motion a novel that explores the tenacity of memory and the difficulty of validating a past love affair in present circumstances. Absence is presence in Catherine's relationship with Harry. So long as he is absent, he remains with her. But when he returns—when he is “in the neighborhood”—his presence causes problems. At first glance Harry and Catherine seems to describe only the traditional triangle of two men vying for one woman, but Busch's insight into the pressures of middle age allows him to develop the novel around the more significant—and difficult—question of how to reconcile love and independence. One suspects immediately that Harry would willingly trade independence for love. One also senses that Catherine would do so only with great reluctance.

Busch's characterization of Catherine is splendid. How, one asks, can he understand so much about women? He shows that, for Catherine, the strain between former lover Harry and current lover Carter reflects the sibling rivalry between her teenaged sons; that males are territorial but that Catherine occasionally “acts like territory”; and that the kitchen is the center of the home for a family living six miles from the nearest town in upstate New York. More importantly, he shows that when Catherine closes her bedroom door she is signaling to the males—lovers and sons—her demand for privacy. Like many single parents, Catherine realizes that she must juggle her own desires and her sons' needs. Busch brings a level of sophistication to the ancient tale of the love triangle when he differentiates the boys' identities, develops them into full-fledged characters, and then watches as they inadvertently put pressure on Catherine by expressing their fondness for Harry: “He taught us how to do some first things.” He taught Catherine, too: overweight, restless, needful Harry showed her how to love, but his requirements are now so great that she is unsure she can survive the lessons anymore.

In Harry and Catherine, Busch portrays a domestic particular that has become commonplace in contemporary America: the single parent. Without polemic, without the jargon of the sociologist or the statistics of the social worker, Busch describes Catherine stumbling and coping with pressures that a society of traditional families has not prepared her for, and he describes her with patience and insight. As Busch's title suggests, the social problem he observes is a matter not simply of gender but also of individuals.

Technique supports theme in Harry and Catherine, which is neither a novel of post-modern complexity like The Mutual Friend (1978)—with its interplay of tale and teller, voice and word—nor one of experimental realism like Invisible Mending—with its comic manipulation of time and tone. Rather, Busch's most recent book is for the most part traditional realism. Equally skilled at writing from the female or male perspective, as were William Dean Howells and Henry James before him, Busch renders the particulars of home and work with such realistic precision that the characters' conversations about the events and emotions of the day both set the scene and tell the tale. One example: when Catherine quietly comments to a son that “women need company,” she is neither distancing herself from feminism nor rationalizing her commitments to Harry and Carter. She is merely balancing her teenaged boy's unspoken desire to be included with her urge to fulfill the self. If, Busch asks with an ear attuned to the home-bred murmurs of the day, a spouse with whom one may talk out problems is no longer available, then who does help one ease the common burdens of the quotidian?

The answer may be no one. Seeing Carter's stare on learning that her son has invited Harry to dinner, Catherine “resents his silent scrutiny—anyone's.” One of the successes of Harry and Catherine is Busch's understanding of the contemporary woman's need simultaneously to reach out and to hold back, to seek companionship and to define the self. Surrounded by males in her own house, a microcosm of the female's social contract, Catherine is a post-feminist woman learning how to give and receive love without denying the demands of her own identity. Harry's advantage over Carter is that he recognizes Catherine's need. Driving back into her life, for instance, he recalls their previous attempt at love (“The News”) as the time when she “almost let” him stay. Catherine's time is hers, and her boys', and only she can decide when she will share it.

The complication in Harry's life is Carter, the other man. One suspects that he was Busch's problem too: how does an author write convincingly about the third person in a love story? From the moment one reads the title Harry and Catherine, one's sympathies are with the vulnerable former couple, the middle-aged lovers whose on-again, off-again affair signals their desire to love and their hesitation to commit. Carter, one thinks, is nothing but the foil. Such is not the case, however. Writing from the female point of view is a difficult task for a male writer, but a similar challenge is the characterization of the interloper. To Busch's credit, Carter enters the novel with the reader's resentment and leaves with the reader's sympathy.

He is not easy to like. With his business suit and city shoes, his “incipient sneer” and love of power, Carter comes across as male strength and prerogative, the hard-edged opposite of rumpled, huggable Harry in khakis and sneakers. Even Carter's occupation suggests force, action—he builds parking lots with heavy equipment, construction gangs, gravel, blacktop. He is uneasy with Catherine's boys and snobbish about wine. He is not, the boys recognize immediately, Harry. However, Busch develops not melodrama but character, and his insights into adult relationships show the vulnerability beneath the surface, the loss beneath the love. Carter's strength, like Harry's generosity, is inextricably mixed with longing and need. The reader who would respond fairly must play the part of Catherine, who has lived with both. And laughed with both—Busch's humor easily wards off sentimentality: “Carter looked at Harry the way most people watch their dentists as they line the drill bits up.”

Aware that Harry is the “most hesitant brave man” she has ever known, and that Carter has difficulty relaxing even when he is fishing, Catherine looks at the men in her life and recognizes the roles that society traditionally asks women to accept: wife, mother, homemaker, nurturer, confessor. Busch poses an interesting question: whether the presence of so many men with their various demands and expectations paradoxically enhances the contemporary woman's individuality by requiring that she define her own space. Catherine's occupation as an art dealer is one thing, a sign to the public of her independence, but her position in her house is quite another; it is by far the more significant to her private sense of self. Men eat at her table, use her bathroom, and sleep in her bed. Her willingness to have them there while simultaneously resisting the power of their presence is her guarantee that she will not be absent from herself. “You do not,” she remembers as she counters an urge to pick up the telephone, “call your boy in college when you're feeling middle-aged and a touch discouraged by life.” The problem, of course, is that males require from females guarantees that women are now unwilling to make. Harry and Catherine illustrates that one does not have to write about apocalypse and angst to communicate tension and fear. Gender issues establish the frame, but the heart of this fine novel is the hesitant dialogue, the feelings trying to find shape in words, that Harry, Catherine, and Carter must share as they awkwardly struggle to act like adults in front of teenaged boys who watch them to learn how to act like adults.

Busch does all this without pyrotechnic display, without fanfare, without showing off. Detailing the points of view of the three protagonists, he narrows the narrative distance between reader and character and thus generates sympathy for these flawed people living their unspectacular lives. The initiated reader will note the skill beneath the deceptively calm surface, the balance of points of view, the different voices assigned to characters facing similar problems. Carter stumbling through his dark, dirty house while berating himself for his jealousy and fear; Harry grinning in his burgeoning fat while conceding to himself that his role as innocent interloper is an act; Catherine welcoming the attention while persuading herself that she loves “her bed, her comforter, her room”: all three characters become individuals through Busch's artful manipulation of words, his commitment to create people one will recognize, men and women like oneself. Readers of Harry and Catherine are so likely to be caught up in the complexity of story that only on finishing the novel would they appreciate how the tale is told.

The tale that Busch tells is, finally, about what he calls “the uselessness of language” in the presence of love. Using words with care and respect, he simultaneously suggests their inadequacy. One of Carter's former lovers says to him, “Have you been told? You expect too much of women.” Similarly, Harry says to Catherine about her sons, “You love them so hard.” And Catherine listens to Harry struggling to explain his longing for family, his need to be part of something “indivisible.” He used to shape words to write poems; now he manipulates words to write speeches. What is not said in these conversations is more painful than what is spoken. In a novel of delicately paced dialogue, Busch shows that a mature response to love is possible only when one understands the silence between the words. The last word in the novel—Sure—is unspoken.

War Babies is strikingly different from Harry and Catherine. Busch probes the violent underside of love and history in this short novel, investigating insidious connections between the recent past and the immediate present, between war and peace, and between betrayal and commitment. Looming in the background of War Babies is the almost-forgotten tragedy known as the Korean War, a savage battle of opposing cultures and races that seemed finally to be absorbed by the cold war policies that caused it. Always the meticulous observer of domestic tension, Busch examines not the war itself but the effect on two of its children. The American Peter Santore may love the English woman Hilary Pennels, but the ghosts of their fathers lurk too close to the surface for love to neutralize the fallout from treason, the evidence that Peter's father turned traitor and indirectly caused the death of Hilary's father when both were incarcerated in a Chinese POW camp.

War Babies is a story of betrayal, but Busch's interests lie far beyond the melodrama of battlefields and prisons. Using the murky history of one incident in the Korean War as a frame, he imagines a small domestic crisis that surfaces thirty years later. An attorney by trade, Santore inquires into the probability that his American father victimized an English ally. Although Peter and Hilary are unacquainted until he arrives in England to investigate his father's past, they quickly become deeply entwined, each acting as both victim and victimizer of the other. Despite sexual commitment and the promise of love, they betray each other with a facility that can only be a reflection of the past.

The irony of Busch's resonant title is thus quiet but punishing. One suspects from the first page, when Santore announces his need to travel to the cathedral city of Salisbury, that Busch will play out his small tragedy in Thomas Hardy country. Implacable fate, that harsh disregarder of personal desire and the primary force in Hardy's best fiction, sears the characters in War Babies as deeply as those in Tess. Long the chronicler of the neighborhoods of New York City (Domestic Particulars, Invisible Mending) and the depleted hamlets of upstate New York (Rounds, 1979; Sometimes I Live in the Country, 1986), Busch's use of Hardy territory is not as unexpected as it might appear. From September 1970 through February 1971, Busch lived near East Winterslow, a small town overlooking Salisbury Plain, in a cottage rented from a woman named Hilary. Stonehenge, whose mystical structure figures prominently in War Babies, was nearby. Busch foreshadowed a significant event in the novel when, at the conclusion of an essay about his stay in England entitled “The Mont Blanc Pen” (The Seattle Review, Fall 1985), he wrote: “And Stonehenge now is surrounded by scolding signs, by fences and by gates, and nobody's baby can dance on the stones.” To dance on the stones is to proclaim one's freedom, something the Busch of War Babies and the Hardy of Tess doubt exists.

Busch's choice of first-person narration for War Babies intensifies the impact of Peter's claustrophobic obsession to walk the narrow corridors of his father's hidden past, just as his use of Hardyesque fate undermines Peter's confidence that he can maintain the balance between personal impulse and objective truth. Santore finds the truth, all right, but not so much about the two fathers as about himself. Busch shows with psychological precision how Peter loses the discipline that his training as a lawyer has led him to depend on. Busch's authorial manipulation of his characters is a metaphor for fate's manipulation of its victims.

War Babies brings, then, a new tone to the Busch canon. Most of his novels dissect domestic tragedy while celebrating love and humor and the heroism of hanging on. All the hallmarks of his considerable skill are evident in War Babies—the eye for detail, the psychological realism, the intuition about middle-aged love, the commitment to character and dialogue, the stylish prose—but the affirmation of human resiliency is darkly shaded. Peter and Hilary may toast their dead fathers as absent friends, but at the end of War Babies they are irrevocably absent from each other.

Guilt, Busch shows, is the underside of love. At the beginning of his journey into history, Peter knows that to pursue his father's ghost is to disturb his mother's peace: “What can I do to help you? Didn't I tell you everything I knew? Baby, I only knew the guy four years outa my life.” But Peter suffers the uneasiness of uncertainty, the relentless need to make a whole from the shattered pieces of his past. When he ignores his mother's blunt remark that “guilt's for the Jews and the Germans. Never touch it,” and then flies to England, he already knows that his quest is not for what he ironically calls “the best of times.” The allusion is to the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens is Busch's favorite novelist, and the phrase underscores Peter's father's failure to fulfill the Dickensian role of giving his life for another.

Busch is especially good at directing tension away from the father's betrayal and toward the son's pursuit. Peter realizes that his mission is pointless, that because of his sense of guilt he merely feels the need to spend a few hours in the same town with the daughter of a hero who died as a result of his father's duplicity. What Peter does not understand, however, and what Busch develops in order to spring the trap of fate, is that one cannot disturb the deceptively placid surface of the past without exposing oneself to unexpected turmoil in the present. The turmoil is immediately stirred up in what may be the only questionable moment in this tightly constructed novel, despite the allusions to life's Hardyesque ironies: the first woman Peter notices in Salisbury turns out to be Hilary.

More important, though neither Peter nor the reader understands the significance at the time, is that the older man with Hilary will become the instrument of fate. A survivor of the same Chinese POW camp that held Peter's and Hilary's fathers, Fox has carried his military bearing, his fury, his demand for retribution out of the wastes of Korea and onto the plain of Salisbury. For Fox, the trek is not far. Some readers might complain that Busch forces the hangover of war on the peace of England when he refers to the testing of artillery at Porter Downs and to such wartime tearjerkers as the film Waterloo Bridge when Peter and Hilary first speak, but Busch uses these references to foreshadow Fox's insistence on what William Styron once called “the neverendingness of war.” The reader understands immediately what Peter learns slowly: that Santore's “mission of ignorant need” indirectly exacerbates old wounds as surely as does Fox's frontal assault.

Long a witness to the difficulty of maintaining attachments amid the pressures of the daily routine, Busch examines in War Babies more sinister effects of the conflict than in Take This Man (1981)—where the fallout from World War II seals a decades-long affair in love, if not in marriage. Fate is less generous in War Babies, where Busch shows how the compulsion to use others neutralizes the commitment to nurture. Conceding his erotic attraction to Hilary, Peter is always aware that he will “labor to use her as well,” not for sex—though there is that also—but for his curious notion of a benign vengeance. One sympathizes with Peter as Busch's first-person narration closes the distance between reader and storyteller. Yet one perceives what Peter cannot admit: that in uncovering what he thinks is the truth about a traitor, he plans to tarnish the hero too.

Fox guards the tomb. Committed to surviving by always refighting the war, Fox is Busch's most extraordinary character, a man of complex psychological astuteness and physical strength approached in the Busch canon only by the Charles Dickens character in The Mutual Friend and Zimmer in Invisible Mending. Mythologizing what Hilary terms—with a mixture of irony and respect when referring to her father—“our bloody hero and his bloody ancient war,” Fox never stops reminding Hilary of valor, of brave, beaten POWs who resisted the Chinese and Koreans, of starving dogs that ate the bodies of Fox's fallen comrades. Hilary clearly sees the many-tunneled trap of her relationship with Fox: “I can't decide whether he wants to be my father or to take down me drawers and flop me onto the bed and fill me full of lead.” Peter feels the same conflicting impulses. Although he does not commemorate the horrors of the Korean War as Fox does, he reopens the same wounds. His queries about betrayal amount to duplicity. To get the story of Hilary's father's death, he trades on her need for love. Busch quietly shows how Hilary's quip becomes Peter's fate: “Are you in love with death?” When they first embrace, they are conscious of “the stare of the dead.”

Nowhere else in Busch's work do the dead infringe on the living with such grimness, not even in Manual Labor (1974) where lost children splinter adult lives. Fox is the reason for the change of emphasis, for the eerie sense of dread that Busch finds on the Salisbury Plain. Despite discipline and strength Fox exudes decay, as illustrated by his perpetually runny eyes, his rotting teeth, his foul breath, all incurable symptoms of the malnutrition he endured while a prisoner of war. Insisting that Hilary be what she defines sarcastically as “one of the Order of Infinite Chastity on Account of Korea,” he inhibits her independence by divorcing sex from creativity, which he squashes in his warped notion of honoring her father, and demanding the sterility of unceasing loss. Busch's contrast is nicely measured: Peter's life seems ruined because of a paucity of information about the betrayal, Hilary's because of a surfeit. In Hardy's world the two war babies would deserve both each other and the drama of their attendant fate, but Busch's world is more complicated because of Fox. Fox so molds Hilary's life in the present with the pain of the past that she literally speaks in his tones when describing what she has been told about the horror of the POW camp.

Fox dominates the novel. The reader is finally as fascinated as Peter with this unforgiving survivor whose elegant exterior in the guise of posture and clothes belies a corrupt interior full of sadistic impulse and unstinting hate: “It was like talking to a new creature, something from someplace else.” His toast to the dead—“absent friends”—is more a threat than a salute, and his account of the torture inflicted by the Chinese is as harrowing as anything in contemporary American fiction.

In the background of Fox's relentless tale lies the shadow of Stonehenge. Hilary recalls childhood memories of dancing on the stones, and she is very much aware of Hardy's use of the ancient structure in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. With the accounts of Druid sacrifices of virgins and of Hilary's appreciation of Tess, Busch nudges the reader's curiosity away from what happened in Korea to what happens in Salisbury. This is as it should be, for Busch's strength is clear sight and supple prose when dissecting the usually understated, always felt tensions that sully the atmosphere of domestic affairs. If, the reader wonders, virgins are sacrificed and Tess betrayed, what is Hilary's daily routine behind the walls of her historic house with its oddly-shaped rooms and thatched roof? Literary parallels may annoy readers unsympathetic to Hardy's notion of destiny, but the question of Hilary's dilemma nevertheless directs the final movement of War Babies. Busch intrigues the reader as thoroughly as fate entraps the characters.

Thus toward the conclusion of the novel Busch gives Peter a choice: to turn back from Hilary's house or to peer behind the bedroom wall. Aware that his path has finally forked, but refusing to walk wisely, Santore makes the wrong decision. What he discovers is the mutuality of betrayal, the ease with which everyone uses everyone else, the always-clenched grip of the past. The fathers may be gone but their presence is invariably felt. Fox sees to that. Always the subject of Busch's best fiction, adult love is shattered near the monoliths of Stonehenge in War Babies. Peter learns a truth that Hardy and Busch have long known: betrayers are also victims.

War Babies and Harry and Catherine illustrate opposite sides of Busch's canon. In the former the domineering male, with his humorlessness and power hiding pain, wrecks the female's life while failing to find a way back to his own. This grim, taut novel reveals Fox's discipline as a facade, Hilary's self-sufficiency as a sham. In the latter, however, the hesitant male, with his memories and love exposing need, invades the female's life while trying to define his own. Harry's longing is as formidable as Catherine's strength. The varieties of love are at stake in both novels, and in both love fails. In the world of Frederick Busch, friends are always absent.