[The Mutual Friend] is a venturesome novel, a substantial achievement, and it should be widely read. For the author of Manual Labor and Domestic Particulars, this new work represents a change. The previous books were in some sense family documents—intensely personal texts, charged with contemporary discourse and present problems. Busch seemed a kind of poet of claustrophobia. Whether writing of the city or farm, in Brooklyn or New England's hills, he stayed very close to the bone. His characters had Breathing Trouble, as in an early title; he cut tight, constricting circles, and had his people leashed.

Now the circles have enlarged. The Mutual Friend, as its name should suggest, owes a great deal to Charles Dickens. It starts with Dickens in America, on a reading tour, and ends with the end of the 19th century, in a London charity hospital…. Busch's erudition has been put to...