Frederick Busch has written seven considerable works of fiction since 1971…. His subject is that bare, forked animal, unaccommodated man, in his domestic particulars: the dark night of the soul, as we all know, is quite likely to happen while you're fixing the flashing on the porch roof. Busch vigorously accepts the incongruity of domestic tragedy and under-writes it, requiring his reader to pay attention and notice the small signs of human experience….

Rounds is full of quick, sure portraits, many of them funny, the best of them etched in acid: the young and spacy, the dying, the newborn, the loving and the merely horny, the middle-aged who muddle through and the emotionally illiterate of all ages. Busch, a wise, humorous, and perfectly unsententious writer, obviously enjoys his sorties into social portraiture, but his true subject is a moral landscape. Its boundaries are formed by cries for help, some...