In contrast, something fascinatingly altruistic haunts the pages of Frederick Busch's new book, Absent Friends, despite its themes of loneliness and estrangement. Busch begins this collection of fourteen stories with an epigram from A Tale of Two Cities the burden of which is that every beating heart is “a secret to the heart nearest it,” and that “Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself” may be referable to that fact. Nonetheless in stating things as he has, Busch, like Dickens, only convinces us the more of his gregariousness, despite his affectation of despair.

To be sure, many of these stories are set in the North where it is cold, and all the characters experience the pain of separation, but most of them also seem to be on a mission to overcome their loneliness. In the opening novella-length “From the New World,” a middle-aged son decides not to open the letter his deceased father left for him, not to acknowledge the old hurts and old pains which had driven him from his family in the first place and, moreover, not to argue with his sister over the distribution of the remaining family possessions. And it is this refusal to give in to recrimination and despair that is the book's most characteristic feature. Therefore, while the world contains teachers who betray their students, nursing home parents who no longer know their children, sisters who haven't been home for some years, adulterous moms and dads, wives who get taken hostage in Beirut, and mothers who commit suicide, it also contains people who care. In “Ralph the Duck,” a college security guard, no intellectual but no fool, courageously saves the life of a co-ed on a freezing night after a drug overdose. The story “In Foreign Tongues” describes a therapy group in which Ouida, Boris, Solly, and the narrator discover they don't always have to feel lonely even though “this is the city. This is where people always feel lonely.” We can only wonder how Busch can stick so exclusively to a single theme and yet make his stories so seamless and his characters so sharply delineated. Perhaps it is because of his facility, like Raymond Carver's, to look on foolishness and pain and call them human.

In this capacity he not so much contrasts Peter Matthiessen's concern over our haplessly ambiguous moral situation but complements it and makes it well. Now that I think about it, that may be the best reason for lining books up together while we read. Susan Sontag once stated that we needed “an approach to single books of fiction which doesn't slight the fact that they exist in dialogue with each other.” I agree, even if the only venue for that dialogue is the reader's mind.