Frederick Busch

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Three Problematic Novels: 'Rounds'

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Despite the homely virtues with which their creator has endowed them, the characters in ["Rounds"] are often a little hard to take. Whether physicians, academics or undergraduates, they all talk too much and at unrelaxed levels of cleverness and cuteness. They leave little unsaid, no verbal shot unreturned.

The source of the problem is that Frederick Busch wants to display in realistic detail his characters in their daily rounds…. The author knows how certain things are done in the world, and is not content to leave his knowledge in the background. But as a novelist he also knows that conversation is not dialogue, that what two people say to each other in their daily rounds is generally short, inelegant and unmemorable. Here he must be unfaithful to the diurnal world, he must invent. Dialogue in a realistic novel is best saved for the moments of high drama.

There are a number of such moments in "Rounds." The main characters are a childless couple who want to adopt a baby, a pediatrician whose wife has left him, a woman who bears a child out of wedlock, and the father of the child. Mr. Busch stages their successive confrontations, and at the end he brings these and others together in a wild search for the kidnapped baby. In these scenes out of the daily round, the storyteller's ancient magic works once more and Mr. Busch draws the reader into his world.

Robert Buffington, "Three Problematic Novels: 'Rounds'," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1980 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), January 13, 1980, p. 22.

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