The subject of Frederick Busch's intelligent, careful, often brilliant, but inert novel ["The Mutual Friend"] is Charles Dickens, the driven dying Dickens of 1867–70 as summoned up by Dolby, his tour manager and companion, as he himself is dying 30 years later, a charity case in a Fulham hospital….

It is a serious and scrupulous fiction Mr. Busch has concocted…. There are no elaborate set pieces of Victoriana, no huggermugger "vivid sights and sounds" where we might expect to find Oliver Twist or Pip walking down the street. Nor does Mr. Busch attempt to do a version of the Victorian novel, à la "The French Lieutenant's Woman." This is a contemporary American novel, written by a man who once wrote a book about John Hawkes….

The most striking positive virtue of "The Mutual Friend" is Mr. Busch's way with Dickens's voice, as speaker and occasional narrator. For Mr. Busch to try...