[The stories collected in Hardwater Country demonstrates that Frederick Busch] is a skilled writer, as capable of using a woman's consciousness as narrator as a man's. He can write with equal facility and conviction in the first person as a plumber who comes to the house of an incompetent Jew to fix his pump; as an inventory-taker who works at a failing Midwestern bookstore and is at the same time in search of a brother he thinks has died…. Busch's method is to start with the commonplace…. [Using] ordinary materials he works shrewdly toward extraordinary endings. Every one of these 13 stories is interesting, and many of them are so beautifully controlled and moving as to be unforgettable. Busch has no single "style" or voice. Instead he adopts a new persona, a new voice, for every story. The result is characters and events of great originality.

Doris Grumbach, "'Light'...