Synopses & Reviews
Here is that rarest and most satisfying of books: a grown-up love story. Harry and Catherine have been falling in and out of love for many years. She is divorced, determinedly raising two sons, and running a small gallery in upstate New York. He is an ex-newspaperman, a wistful drifter, now assistant to a New York senator. After a long separation, Harry is assigned to find out whether a new shopping mall in Catherine's neighborhood will desecrate an historic black cemetery. Catherine is living with another man, a contractor for the mall who finds both his financial interests and his relationship with Catherine threatened by Harry. With penetrating acuity and generosity of spirit, one of our finest writers brings us what David Bradley calls "a book people will love and be proud of loving."
Review
Busch's treatment of love after 40 is both sensitive and highly entertaining." Library Journal
Review
"Unsuppressed emotion, painful honesty...all of it in the most lively and supple language anyone is writing today." Rosellen Brown
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"For years Frederick Busch has been at work on one of the most impressive bodies of American fiction." Reynolds Price
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"I think Frederick Busch is a writer of great and generous gifts, and Harry and Catherine is one more document in a growing body of plain proof of this a record of sustained excellence that deserves, that demands, our attention." Richard Bausch
Review
"Harry and Catherine is an eloquent story, lucid and vivid in its portrayal of the journey of a man and a woman toward each other it is a kind of pilgrimage, really penetrating and fluent in its evocation of love's rigors and its bounty. Mr. Busch's tale is bright with comedy; his sense of the ridiculous in human affairs, always just and sympathetic." Paula Fox
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"[Frederick Busch] is expert on the way work feels, and the way people feel about their work. Nobody knows more than he about love and the English sentence. Harry and Catherine is a hurt joy of a book, a gritty celebration." Janet Burroway
Review
"Busch has succeeded here in the task that Tolstoy set every writer: to grasp the reader by the back of the neck and force him to love life. Under the spell cast by this book, we do." Leslie Epstein
Synopsis
Here is that rarest and most satisfying of books: a grown-up love story. With penetrating acuity and generosity of spirit, one of the finest writers brings readers what David Bradley calls "a book people will love and be proud of loving".
Synopsis
"For years Frederick Busch has been at work on one of the most impressive bodies of American fiction."--Reynolds Price
About the Author
Frederick Busch, the author of six story collections and thirteen novels, has been honored for his fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Prize for achievement in the short story. His novel The Night Inspector was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University. He and his wife, Judy, the parents of two grown sons, live in upstate New York.
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
1. Did you find your sympathies shifting over the course of the book between Harry, Catherine, and Carter? If so, when?
2. Near the end of the book, after Carter has buried the bones on Catherine's land, Harry says, "That's what you get for digging things up." Throughout the book, there are scenes of excavation (the graveyard, the snake in the garden, even Harry's scorched-earth apartment cleaning). How does this imagery tie in with the ways in which characters deal with their own "buried" pasts, with memories and feelings they may or may not want to dig up? What connections, for example, might one find between the graveyard and Harry and Catherine's relationship?
3. What are we to make of the other marriages and relationships presented in the book? Are there any that seem particularly ideal?
4. How does Frederick Busch use the setting (i.e., landscape, season, the details of Catherine's house and land) to lend resonance to the story?
5. Work and jobs figure prominently in the novel. Harry uses his job to both get to Catherine and get at Carter. Contrasts are set up between the sort of work someone like the senator does and the sort of work someone like Truscott John does, or, perhaps more pertinently, between the work of Harry and that of Carter. In addition, there is Catherine, whom we never really see working at her job at the gallery, but whose domestic work -- gardening, cooking, and firewood chopping -- constitutes much of the action of the novel. There's even Drown, who sees it as his job to howl at the moon and follow everyone on walks. Discuss the centrality of work and jobs (and the distinction between the two) in the novel, especially in light of Busch's own work, that of a novelist, and the fact that he has written a nonfiction work about the writing life entitled The Dangerous Profession.
6. Similarly, issues of property and ownership run throughout the story: ownership of the graveyard, Catherine's bristling at the implication that either Carter or Harry "owns" her, her fear of losing her sons. How do these different ideas of ownership drive the story and motivate the characters? John Locke argued that one earns ownership through labor. What would Catherine say to that in regards to her garden? in regards to Harry's determined attempt to win her back?
7. Harry, like Busch, is a writer. It's a surprise, then, to hear him say, "One thing I've learned about words is how little to trust them. Do what you need to do, and shut up." What are we to make of this distrust? Perhaps think of the way in which, though the novel is full of people who speak their minds with wit and wisdom, the last scene in the novel is punctuated with gaping lacunae and swerving circumlocutions. Indeed, the talk -- and, therefore, the book -- ends with a silent and somewhat ambiguous response to a question.
8. Another way to look at Harry's feelings on language is in relation to the attention lavished on physical detail. Again, the book's closing scene is a good example, but there are many other scenes -- especially those in which Harry and Catherine are cooking or gardening together -- where the deftness of the dialogue is matched by the richness of the sensual detail. Are there ways in which these scenes validate, even enact, Harry's distrust of language?
9. Catherine's son Randy brackets the novel, appearing at the beginning and, via phone, at the end. He is away at college for the duration of Harry's long second visit. When he returns for Thanksgiving, Harry will most likely be gone. Is there any significance to the fact that one's presence means the other's absence?
10. What will Harry do now? Catherine? Will she end up with Carter again?
11. Harry and Catherine is subtitled "A Love Story." Near the end of the novel Catherine tells Harry that she has not heard him say the word "love" once during his stay. That is not true; he has said it a few times. She, however, has not. What do you make of this?
12. The word that Harry and Catherine both use a little more often than "love" is "need." How does Harry feel about the relationship between love and need? How does Catherine?
13. Up until Bobby's accident with the ax, Catherine seems to be leaning toward asking Harry to stay. Afterward, however, she has decided to send him away. What has spurred the change of heart? How do differing definitions and attitudes about love and need play themselves out in this final rejection?