The missions of the title give a thematic unity to this dark
collection of 15 stories from Busch (North, 2005, etc.), who died
last February.Death haunts this collection. In "I Am the News," two
brothers, one thriving, the other facing ruin, meet after the death
of their father, a proud former Marine. Though the successful
brother and his father were ideological foes, he respects the
Marine ethos and looks out for his kid brother. Another veteran
figures in the far more effective "Good to Go." Patrick, back from
Iraq, has just bought a surplus army gun. Can his frantic parents
wrest it away from this hard young man they no longer know? "Metal
Fatigue" is another small gem. Harold is visiting daughter Linda in
a mental hospital after her suicide attempt. Deranged, yet
shockingly lucid, she uses another family tragedy, her
grandfather's death, to browbeat her loving dad. That tight focus
is missing from the off-key "The Bottom of the Glass," in which an
obese, interracial married couple travels to France to console a
distant relative after her second husband's death. Passionate sex
as an antidote to death (the point of "One Last Time for Old Times'
Sake") is tiresomely delayed by talk about death during a lovers'
final tryst, while in "The Small Salvation," a middle-aged man's
liberating sexual encounter with a kindergarten teacher is clouded
by memories of his wife's death. In the title story, Edward is a
staffer at a Rescue Mission. He knows all about abuse (his mother
was killed by an abusive boyfriend) yet his attempt to help a
doomed young woman is unavailing. And when, in "The Hay Behind the
House," compassionate Cara travels upstate from New York to save
her parents from old age, it's her mother who saves her from
rape.These stories reaffirm Busch's familiar vision of good deeds
counting for little in a dangerous world. (Kirkus Reviews)
The war in Iraq is present in some of these stories, and so are the
domestic wars; and, in every case, a character seeks to comfort or
to save someone. "The Rescue Mission" is narrated by a man who runs
a rescue mission out of a trailer in upstate New York. In his
attempt to save a young woman from the brutality of her boyfriend,
he is forced to confront the reality of his own mother's death. In
"Good to Go," an estranged couple try to save their grown son from
the scars of war. Physical love, familial love, the need to give
comfortand the need for comfortare themes skillfully rendered by a
master of the short story whose achievements have been acknowledged
with the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction and the American
Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit for lifetime achievement
in the short story.
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