Frederick Busch's deeply moving novel [Rounds] probes the harrowed lives of two middle-aged couples struck by recent tragedy…. Faced with a childless void, each pair must overcome the inevitable, stalking demons—the compulsive guilt, the overriding urge to fix blame, the gnawing sense of insufficiency—that bar them from the therapeutic restitution of their selves and the necessary redefinition of their relationships.

The Silvers and the Sorensons undertake this task in different ways, and Busch's alternation of the telling of their stories enhances his theme….

The men and women who inhabit the fictions of Frederick Busch have always been an unfortunate lot. They are made to suffer depredations few of us, thankfully, will ever have to bear. Fate repeatedly confounds them, dashing futures, haunting pasts, and yet they endure. Busch insists that they survive, and it is their gradual, tentative unfolding, that intensely anguished but determined reassemblage of...