I believe that finding a writer who has a talent for saying ordinary things in extraordinary ways is one of the greatest little pleasures of life. With that in mind, I suggest the fiction of Frederick Busch as this week’s recommended reading.
Busch, a professor at Colgate, has authored many works and won major prizes, but I have only recently started to read him. In fact I’m still in the first collection of his stories that I’ve picked up, The Children in the Woods. Nonetheless, I can already see why he’s described as one of the country’s top writers on subjects of domestic life and social relationships. He’s excellent at providing incisive descriptions of personal motivations. And his work is riddled with the sort of aphorisms and brand and design-focused illuminations of scenes of daily life that are hallmarks of this type of literature.
He paints a canvas of the mundane with beautiful and delicate detail. He clearly conveys the ideas and thoughts and longings of his subjects. We understand their flaws, feel their search for meaning, and can comprehend the conclusions they draw, even if they are not otherwise obviously satisfactory choices.
Posted by armand at May 16, 2004 05:53 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Books