SOURCE: Fortuna, Diane. Review of Closing Arguments, by Frederick Busch. America 166, no. 3 (1 February 1992): 67-8.

In the following review, Fortuna comments on what she considers Busch's adept handling of the moral ambiguity of the modern era in Closing Arguments.

Perhaps the last years of a century always produce a cultural perception of decadence and chaos. At the turn of the 20th century, diminutive Henry Adams, it is said, walked up and down the halls of Congress shaking his head and complaining that the country was going to the dogs. In our own time, fin-de-siècle despair seems augmented by millenial jitters. Violence, perverse sexuality and corruption, it would seem, are rotting America, its government, its laws and their enforcement. In Frederick Busch's court-room thriller, Closing Arguments, this sense of moral bankruptcy amounts to an indictment of the United States: duplicity during the Vietnam War; corruptible legal system; institutional and...