Don't Tell Anyone
by Frederick Busch

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345443934
Publisher: Ballantine

Karen Novak is a writer and teacher living in Mason, Ohio with her husband and their two daughters. Her first novel, Five Mile House, was published in October 2000. She's currently at work on her second novel

A Conversation with Frederick Busch
KN: You are acclaimed both as a novelist and as a short-story writer. Do certain themes lend themselves better to one or the other?

FB: No, I don't write about "themes." I find that I write about characters. They occur to me, or even haunt me. They come about as I try to answer a question that occurs to me: Why is that small child standing outside in the winter, waiting alone for a school bus, wearing only an insufficient sweater? What could it be like to be those two women, living here in the country in a dilapidated house, working every day--at the labor associated with men--to bring it back from ruin? What happens if you're a kid and your parents love each other more than they love you? And so on. I try to answer those questions about people, in terms of the people, as I make them up; you can get the truth from that sort of making up. And some people--some answers--take the long course of many hours, days, years; they become characters in a novel. Some exist in--and for--a moment: all of their lives may be concentrated in that moment, or it may be the most important event in their lives that the moment expresses. They, of course, become characters in a story. The writer brings them through the story to that culminating moment and then seals them up in amber; they're preserved forever in the instant of hearing, of knowing, of feeling, of sensing--or of willfully turning away from--what will prove, all their lives, to have been the crucial instant of every other moment they go on to live.

KN: Do you prefer one form to the other?

FB: I'm a failed poet, and the story is closer to the poem I wish I could write. The novel examines people as time roars through them like a great river. The novel, alas, takes forever to write. And you're responsible for so much when you write it, and therefore the novelist, it seems to me--if that writer is honest and really wants to make art--is always dissatisfied, cranky, worried that he or she has failed the characters. If you fail your characters, then you fail your readers, and of course you then fail yourself.

KN: One more quick question about form: Is the novella a long short story, a short novel, or a hybrid of some sort?

FB: The novella is a hybrid, I believe; longer (and, most importantly, thicker and broader) than a story, with room for several characters and the strand of story that each carries, it permits a multiplicity of concerns that the story tends not to support, but it focuses more narrowly than--what I think of as--the novel. The novella is a delight to write because you can do so much in it, yet can avoid the responsibilities that are incumbent on the novelist. And you get to finish it! While the novel, as you write it, seems to go on and on, requiring ever more--weather, details of history, ancillary or supporting characters who must be served as fully as major characters. For the reader, it's a fuller experience, perhaps less dramatically emphatic as to the moment of realization, the sense of a crux having been reached and failed or survived, as in the case of a short story, but still offering a sense of both drama and more conscious thought about a matter (as well as a moment) than the story.

KN: One of the sections in the novella, A Handbook for Spies, is titled "A Father Stolen or Strayed." Those words lend a sense of what is at work in this collection of stories as a whole, and several of the stories seem almost preparation for the novella that closes Don't Tell Anyone. Could you comment on the design of the collection and why you chose to include these pieces?

FB: The stories are about people whose lives are fraught. They need to tell their story (as, most obviously, in "The Talking Cure," the title of which comes from the description by an early psychoanalytic patient about her experience in therapy). They also fear to tell their story. If they don't tell it, they sicken, their lives are unhealthy; if they do tell it, they might feel relieved, yet they might also feel exposed--emotionally naked. The book, for me, is "about" the story: how well we tell it about ourselves and others, the various ways in which we tell, the ways we seek not to tell. As for "A Father Stolen or Strayed," that title for a section of the novella is an echo of one of the concerns I believe I, and some readers, find in my work: the fractured family, the family as it frays, the way we function or fail to as a unit of parents and children who are dependent upon each other yet, sometimes, inimical to each other. That image of Hansel and Gretel being led into the dark woods by their parents, who will leave them to be eaten by forest creatures so that the parents have enough food--a family "where," as I've written elsewhere, "hunger comes first"--is a motivating and haunting vision that drives a good deal of my work, I think. Of course, I'm seeking a paradisal opposite to that situation. And, once in a while--in the case, say, of Catherine and her children in my novel Harry and Catherine, Rochelle and her children in Closing Arguments, Chun Ho and William Bartholomew and Chun Ho's kids in The Night Inspector, as well as some of the parents and some of the children in these stories--I feel lucky to find some families in which generosity prevails.

KN: In "Bob's Your Uncle," the character of Jillie, deeply wounded by a double betrayal, asks her husband, "What did you think was coming to you that you deserved so much?" That question appears in different ways throughout the collection. Is it that "wanting more" that makes the American family so tenuous?

FB: Not what I was thinking of, although you're right about Americans in general--the world's middle class in general: Appetite leads us to devour our lives without tasting them, and we expect what we might not earn. But, no, I was thinking of matters that are more individual: How so many of us, individually, think that we've a right to satisfaction. People complain that they're not fulfilled, that they're denied, that the world does not give them what they hunger for. The husband in "Bob's Your Uncle" thought he had a right to that splendid woman because he wanted, even needed, her. I pray for, wish for, believe in, hope to have, more discipline than that. Be brave. Keep your clothing on. Help someone else. Stop whining. This is a time of everyone writing memoirs about their deprivations--soft-core psychological pornography, a lot of it--and of people telling us what they need and need and need. And I keep thinking: Do go ahead and make somebody ELSE glow with satisfaction. I guess it's the Boy Scout in me.

KN: Near the end of the novella, Willie's father says, "We--that is to say, people, we included--will always be strangers. We should nevertheless try always to be friends." Is that a response to the hurting children in these stories?

FB: It's a response to the wounded children and the wounded everyone-else in the stories. But it's my sad, sad conclusion. I think of watching my children, when they were infants, as they slept. I think of watching my wife, Judy, now, when she sleeps. I watch those eyelids pulse with their inner life--dreams, neurons randomly firing in their nervous system, or the muttering to itself of the deep subconscious: Who knows? And who knows what thoughts, dreams, visions, terrors, or mundane concerns are racing to and fro in there, under their eyelids, inside the secrecy of their skulls? I don't know. I cannot know. I never will know, for they probably don't--in a conscious way--know either. So they, whom I love more than myself, beyond all others, remain unknown to me. They are, in that way, lost to me. And, while celebrating their gloriousness, I find myself mourning at the same time. It's like the past: always tickling, or even grinding, us in the present; never vanished, yet not apprehensible--except through art. In my work, I think I am seeking or celebrating or, least useful of all, mourning that unknown territory of those I love and those whom, on my behalf, my characters love, and the vast, subconscious continent between them and me, between them and themselves.

KN: Unfair question: Do you have any particular favorites among these stories?

FB: I like "Joy of Cooking" because it was rejected by every glossy magazine in America, and by many of the literary quarterlies, and yet it is a story that readers of the book mention very frequently as a favorite of theirs. "Domicile" steals its little trailer, and the building of walls, but not the emotional truths, from the life of one of our sons. "A Handbook for Spies" took me thirty years to get right; I've been working on the Vietnam era and some of those social matters--including the anti-Semitism and the chanting of the names of the dead, including the disappearing father--since the late 1960s or early 1970s. But all these stories are my children, and I care about them as I do for our sons, Ben and Nick: with a father's total love for each.

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