SOURCE: Wilhelmus, Tom. Review of Absent Friends, by Frederick Busch. Hudson Review 43, no. 1 (spring 1990): 153-54.

In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus examines the subtle message of hope and empowerment in Absent Friends.

In contrast, something fascinatingly altruistic haunts the pages of Frederick Busch's new book, Absent Friends, despite its themes of loneliness and estrangement. Busch begins this collection of fourteen stories with an epigram from A Tale of Two Cities the burden of which is that every beating heart is “a secret to the heart nearest it,” and that “Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself” may be referable to that fact. Nonetheless in stating things as he has, Busch, like Dickens, only convinces us the more of his gregariousness, despite his affectation of despair.

To be sure, many of these stories are set in the North where it is cold, and all the characters experience the pain...