SOURCE: Greiner, Donald J. “The Absent Friends of Frederick Busch.” Gettysburg Review 3, no. 4 (autumn 1990): 746-54.

In the following essay, Greiner analyzes Busch's characterizations in regard to definitive gender roles, sexual identity and freedom in Harry and Catherine and War Babies.

Not many American authors make a career of writing about adult love. The vagaries of youth seem more popular, sweetly sad accounts of how the indifferent world, or war, or family, or life itself trips up the first, tentative steps toward passion and commitment. But for Frederick Busch the dilemmas of middle age are the heart of fiction, the complex material that the writer shapes in order to show how most of us live our lives. Busch is interested not in the cliché of the star-crossed lover but in the little tensions of the quotidian, the apparently insignificant slips and slides of the daily routine that eventually cause...