Girls

by Frederick Busch

  Q: Let’s talk about the dog. A great dog.

  A: Good, I liked him, too.

  Q: Why no name? Why a chocolate Lab? And how on earth did you manage to get into its chocolate head so well?

  A: It had no name … I hadn’t given him a name for a couple of chapters—I realized that suddenly I was used to hearing Jack refer to him as “the dog.” And I thought, “Wow, I’d better give him a name,” and then I thought, there is no name Jack could give him. Jack is a man who is unable to name his dog. And that tells us a lot about him. He’s a guy who can’t say “I love you,” who can’t say “Fanny, let’s go to counseling together.” Because he doesn’t quite believe in speech. He’s not a man of words. He’s absolutely a man of actions and thoughts. It’s the other people around him who are people of words.

  How do I get inside his head, and why a chocolate Lab? I’ve always wanted to have a chocolate Lab and never did, so I decided it was time to have one. Also, Judy and I have always had two and sometimes three Labradors, and they’ve always been black. And I didn’t want to make the dog in the book a black Lab because if my Labradors ever got wind of it, they might be embarrassed. So that’s why it’s a chocolate Lab. And how did I get inside his head? Because we’ve lived with Labradors for about thirty years.

  Q: Girls examines the darker side of life. Why?

  A: I live in a dark part of the country. My ancestors come from a dark part of the world, which is Russia, and I am a serious artist, which means that what I am looking to understand is the bad news, not the good news. I think by and large if you distinguish between serious writing and not-so-serious writing, you would find that the serious writing—even though it might be a love story—[has] room in the book for darkness, for bitter moments, because I think it is that side of life that the artist tries to explore. There are moments of joy, and he or she may bring explosions of joy to the page; but by and large I think our responsibility is to explore the more frightening moments on behalf of our readers. I think that’s why they may value us, if they do.

  Q: They value us because we do it for them? Sort of like a surrogate?

  A: Yes. We do it with them—if you’re a good writer, you get your readers to care as you do about certain huge facts or factors that are at stake in your book. Big values: You’re worrying about love and death and need and all those huge abstractions. And the courtesy that good writers perform is to make them concrete, instead of abstract, through characters and events. And the courtesy readers perform is to permit writers to take them on that dark and sometimes frightening ride. Now, not only do I live in a dark part of the country and am, I guess, a man with a proclivity for those dark thoughts, but I was living here at a time when actual small human girls were being stolen from their safety and raped and murdered and eaten and butchered and God knows what happened to them. And I became inconsolably involved in the terrible loss that their families were going through, and I wanted to do something. This is all I could do. And that’s why I created a man like Jack, who at best would be clumsy and only get halfway near the bitter truth, because that was all I could do.

  Q: You say that “serious” writing is writing that portrays the darker, more frightening side of life. Then you would agree with the person [Margaret Atwood] who said “A novel about unalloyed happiness would have to be either very short or very boring.”

  A: I would argue that you can find fascinating happiness in the midst of sorrow. So she’s right. Her word “unalloyed” is the key … what makes us interesting to each other is the trouble we get each other in, just a little bit, and then the way we console each other.

  Q: You said before you used the Colgate campus for the setting of this novel. How was that received by the Colgate community? Did you get any complaints?

  A: I got a lot of questions; a lot of students and faculty tried to identify people in the book as belonging to the faculty. And I had to tell them—and this is the truth—that nobody in the book reflects anybody living or dead … except one person, who is a model of great human decency, and he has just retired as the head of the campus counseling service. He was the model for Archie. The other was Rosalie Piri—she came in part from a faculty person with that particular nose and mouth. I asked permission and she gave me permission to use those in the novel.

  Q: You’re a very prolific author. What is your inspiration and how do you get started each time?

  A: I’m one of those Jewish puritans—I feel like I have not earned my oxygen and food and water unless I’ve written, and so I try every day to make language—whether or not it’s a successful piece every day. I write essays, book reviews, and letters, I have a novel and short stories under contract. My life is writing. The professional life is writing and it flows into my teaching.

  My home life is absolutely different. It involves Judy and me traveling or cooking or just talking—our boys are grown.… My poor kids were aware from their infancy that periodically every day the old man disappears from sight, and if he comes out surly it means he didn’t do so well, and if he comes out beaming it means it’ll be a better afternoon and evening. They called me “the bear” all through their childhood, because I’d come lurching and lumbering out of my writing room. I have a very nice writing room on the second floor of our barn across a field from our house. The house is a low, white farmhouse, with a white picket fence. We’re five miles from the nearest town on a small country road. The main part of the house was built about 1810. The rest has been added over the years. It sits all alone in the middle of about one hundred acres.

  My first writing room was a bathroom in Greenwich Village … while Judy slept, I would put my portable typewriter on the toilet-seat cover and sit on the bathtub, and that’s where I wrote my first novel.

  Q: What advice do you have for young and aspiring writers? Any secret tricks of the trade to share?

  A: I think aspiring writers, young or old, ought to read all they can. If you don’t love to read, I cannot imagine that your imagination would be fed enough to write. That’s the first piece. Second piece: Assuming you have some talent—you can never grow it, or make it bigger—have enough courage to dare to look straight in the eye what your talent causes you to see. The most important component you can develop is energy, to get up at 5:30 in the morning. It’s hard work, brutally hard work. And it’s frustrating and you fail most of the time. Most of what a serious fiction writer does is fail. But in spite of rejection by yourself, your editors, agents, and readers—the first novel I published was the fourth I wrote—you have to keep going. That’s the hardest part. Finally, try to treat writing like skating on very thin ice: Keep moving or else you’ll fall in. And finally, finally: Don’t be precious, believe you’re writing to be read, believe in the needs and thoughtfulness of your reader, and honor your reader.

  That’s it from Busch Central. That’s all I know.

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1: The weather in Girls is severe and relentless. What role does this weather play in the novel, and why? What other books have you studied in which the weather was such a large part of the story? How do climate and landscape tend to affect the lives of individuals as well as larger societies?

  2: Jack is a Vietnam veteran, a self-educated, blue-collar kind of guy. His wife, Fanny, is an emergency room nurse, a job requiring considerable education and training. In what ways do you think their differing backgrounds affect their relationship? Are these effects beneficial or damaging? What commonalities can you find in their backgrounds and/or jobs? Do you think these are sufficient to keep them together?

  3: Did you want Jack and Fanny to get back together? Why or why not, and why do you think Busch arrived at the ending?

  4: Do you think this book fits into the typical detective-novel genre? Why or why not? Why do you think readers like to categorize types of novels? Do you think Girls belongs to any distinct category or genre?

  5: The first chapter directly follows the final chapter in chron
ology. Why do you think the author placed it at the beginning of the book? Did you go back and reread the first chapter after completing the novel? Did doing so alter your perception of the book? If so, how?

  6: Why do you think Jack and Fanny couldn’t discuss the death of their baby after so much time? Has there ever been something you or someone you know couldn’t or wouldn’t discuss? Why do you think people close themselves away like that? How might people avoid doing so, or help each other overcome it?

  7: In recent years there unfortunately have been many highly publicized cases of missing girls like Janice Tanner. Do you think these cases have always occurred and are just being played up by the media today? Or do you think something has shifted in our society that is causing an increase in such tragedies? Do you discuss these disappearances with your friends or your families? If so, how do you respond? Do you feel safe in modern society?

  8: Jack lives in a world of extreme coldness, bleakness, and silence. It seems that the only lightness in his world is his nameless dog. Why do you think this is so? What function does the dog serve in the novel as a whole? In Jack’s life? What do you think the author had in mind when he chose to include the dog in this story?

  9: When did you as a reader think you knew who was responsible for Janice Tanner’s disappearance? Who did you think did it, and why? Were you right?

  10: What role does Professor Piri play in this drama?

  11: Fanny is repeatedly described as capable and competent, and of course, her job is one of helping to save lives. Juxtapose this with the circumstances and aftermath of their daughter’s death, and discuss what effect this combination has had on Fanny.

  12: As this is a work of fiction, the writer could do with his characters whatever he wished. Why do you think the author let Jack get beat up so badly?

  13: Jack and Fanny’s marriage is a paradox: two people who love and are bound to each other, and yet cannot seem to live together. Discuss this paradox and why it exists. Do you know anyone with such a paradox in their lives? What is it like, and how do they resolve or live with it?

  14: Why do you think Jack found Rosalie Piri so irresistible? He obviously loved Fanny and really wanted to make it work with her; yet he barely hesitated before he got involved with Rosalie. What do you think motivated him, or prevented him from resisting the affair with her?

  15: Why didn’t Jack drag Fanny in to talk to Archie? Why didn’t Archie push for them to get counseling together? Many people in our society often resist counseling when they most need it. Why do you think this is so?

  16: Jack goes into the Tanners’ church, and still finds himself unable to pray. Yet he really wants to. Why can’t Jack pray?

  17: Identify all the different girls in the book who could contribute to the book’s title. What do they all have in common? How do they differ? Do you think Girls was a good choice of title? If not, what might you have named the book?

  18: Why does Jack harass William, the drug dealer from Staten Island? Jack knows he’s not really guilty, at least not of being involved in the Janice Tanner case. Yet he knowingly beats him, and quite brutally at that. Why would Jack, who is basically a good man, do such a thing?

  19: What do you think was the author’s purpose in including the subplot about the vice president’s impending visit?

  Frederick Busch is the author of twenty-seven books. Girls was a New York Times Notable Book. He has received the PEN/Malamud Award in short fiction, and, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Award of Merit. His books have been finalists for the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Awards. He and his wife live in upstate New York.

  Excerpts from reviews of Frederick Busch’s GIRLS

  “Girls is about as close to perfect as a novel gets. Its prose is clean and strong but never advertises its own quiet brilliance, its characters are sharply defined and irresistible, and its plot is suspenseful enough to keep you up until dawn.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “Combining the quick pace of a detective story with the bold poetics of literary work, Frederick Busch’s taut new novel, Girls, is a dark, compulsively readable drama.… From the makings of an all-too-common evening-news item, Busch has fashioned a novel of considerable weight and dimension. By imbuing the lurid with the introspective, he has given a stock story intelligence, humanity, and terrific range.”

  —Elle

  “When a book is this successful it’s impossible to detect any sign of artistic struggle.… Jack is such an absorbing and sympathetic narrator.… nothing [Busch] has published in the past has quite prepared me for the seductive beauty of this very disturbing book.… Its pitch-perfect dialogue, skillfully contrived plot, and authentically wintry atmosphere are all exceptional, but a great deal of its strength comes from the moral complexity of its characters.… The highest compliment a reader can pay a literary thriller—or any novel, for that matter—is to claim that the book is nearly as intricate and mysterious as life itself, that the reader has lived in the book as if it were a particularly lifelike dream, and cared about its characters as if they were real. All these claims are true about Girls.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “It is a dark tale, but it’s told with an economical mastery and intensity that only a few current novelists can command. Busch even manages to create a dog who is real, touching but never cute, and the perfect life-enhancing foil for the human sorrows around him.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The novel’s social realism gives it the page-turning pace of a mystery. But Busch’s masterly pairing of dark wit and tender mercy is what makes Girls a great work.”

  —Us

  “This well-written and engrossing novel is part mystery and part exploration of how grief can manhandle a marriage.”

  —Booklist

  “Girls is about pain and what happens when pain can’t find its way out of the human vessel.… Girls is unusually entertaining.… In the end, this is a chilling story about the guilt of adulthood.”

  —Time Out

  “Though the crime story is intriguing, it is Jack’s growing insight about his marriage, his town, and himself that transforms this page-turner about lost children into a tender and eloquent examination of the even greater mystery that is the human heart.”

  —Glamour

  “Fierce, wise, gripping and true, Girls marks the continuing evolution of a first-rate American storyteller.… the triumph of Girls is in its clear-eyed compassion for all those who try to flee from the bedrock realities of their lives.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A complex and disturbing vision of the world as a place filled with danger powers this fascinating novel.… It all works superbly as a conventional thriller, though the story’s most effective as a harrowing expression of the fragility of our defenses against loss and death, and a moving characterization of its memorable protagonist, a decent man who struggles against powerful odds to remain one.”

  —Kirkus Reviews