SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Sorrow and the Pity Balanced by Power and Beauty.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 May 1989): 3.

In the following review, Eder praises the stories in Busch's Absent Friends and provides highlights of the pieces he finds particularly poignant.

If Frederick Busch wrote about grapes, the birds would eat them off the pages. He writes about people, and we rock slightly in their wind as they go by.

Like other prominent American short story writers, his subject is distances of all kinds; between mates, lovers, friends, generations, bosses and employees, and most of all, between the individual and his or her life.

Busch is not content with revealing the distances. He dramatizes them. His characters rail at them, fight them, treat them with passion. They speak vividly, bitingly; they are often defeated but rarely resigned.

Almost all the stories in Absent Friends are downbeat, but they...