SOURCE: Malin, Irving. Review of Closing Arguments, by Frederick Busch. Review of Contemporary Fiction 12, no. 1 (spring 1992): 162.

In the following review, Malin examines the violence of action and of words in Closing Arguments.

Although many readers of this terrifying, violent novel [Closing Arguments] will view it as a narrative of sexual obsession, of “innocence” and “guilt” (or the ambiguity of each term), they will not notice that Busch is a philosophical writer who is aware of linguistic uncertainty, epistemological difficulty. The novel, we can say, moves on two levels. The narrator, a Vietnam survivor, is a lawyer asked to defend Estella, a “forceful” woman accused of murdering her lover in bed. The violence of the war is subtly married to the violence of sexuality. And we are never allowed to forget the violence. The narration is jagged, broken, dislocated; the sections of the novel are abruptly short. There is...