'North': an uneven blend of genres
North
By Frederick Busch
Norton, 302 pp., $24.95
The most memorable aspect of ''Girls," published in 1997 and a predecessor to Frederick Busch's latest novel, was its landscape. Cold, forbidding, and unbearably lonely, the upstate New York depicted by Busch brought to mind the icy stretches of the Coen brothers murder mystery ''Fargo." But where the film used a pregnant police detective as a counterpoint to the barrenness of nature, ''Girls" did the opposite; its protagonist, Jack, a Vietnam vet working as a campus cop, struggled with memories of his dead daughter as he sifted through the snowy waste for traces of a missing child. Within the shell of the detective novel, then, the reader learned something far more important than the identity of the criminal: It was the idea that nature and nurture are mirror images of each other, with neither fully capable of sustaining life in the frozen north.
Busch's new novel, aptly named ''North," is a continuation of this theme in the most direct way. The setting is the same, the formula continues to be that of hard-boiled detective fiction, and the principal character is still Jack. We find him in the ''hot, wet countryside of the Carolina coast" in the opening pages; his marriage has broken up over the accidental death of his daughter, and he is barely able to contain his despair as he works as a bouncer at a seedy club. A job comes his way through a vacationing Manhattan lawyer; the lawyer is romantically interested in Jack, but she also wants him to trace a nephew who may be holed up in rural New York, the very place where Jack engaged in his struggle with the big questions of life and then abandoned it.
Like its predecessor, ''North" uses the thrust of an investigation as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the subject being explored. The plotting is deft, while the missing nephew is never more than a convenient object to set Jack's quest in motion.
The quest is, of course, to find out what made his marriage disintegrate, and how this breakdown was related to the place where he and his wife lived. Driving back to upstate New York, Jack reflects: ''It was countryside that was in the books of James Fenimore Cooper. . . . It was rough country. It was as battered-looking as the worst I had seen of New England."
What Jack perceives on his return journey is a kind of stripped-down existence, with people adrift not only from the world beyond, but from their own history. Solitude hardens these people, but it also weakens them, just as it did Jack, making him unable to come to terms with his own grief. As Jack looks for the missing nephew in the town of Vienna, he runs into characters who exemplify this struggle for a sense of self: the media baron's daughter, addicted to drugs, kinky sex, and thoughts of getting away; her former classmate, the local policeman; and Jack's ex-cop friend Bird, dying of cancer. This sounds schematic in summary, the characters neatly patterned for a range of complementary and contrasting tones around the refrain of a brutal, crazy landscape. Unfortunately, the novel doesn't quite break through the stranglehold of this design.
That the investigation plot is not particularly gripping seems understandable -- after all, Busch is aiming for greater truths in this novel -- but what Jack has to discover about himself and the place seems a little shopworn as well. Such thinness of motive and affect was a problem visible in ''Girls," but that novel was partially redeemed by Busch's eye for landscape. Here, there is not enough body to the idea of the north to distract one from the problems of characterization or story.
''North," ultimately, leaves one with the impression of an author trapped in middle ground: too committed to literature to be satisfied by the detective story, and too constrained by genre conventions to give full rein to the exploration of place and people. This is especially so in Jack's uncomplicated masculinity; the women, seen through his eyes, are either all good or all bad, while Jack is no more than a reservoir of silent loyalty and stoicism. The effect is mawkish, and it makes the redemption achieved at the end fairly unconvincing. The problem, one might think, lies in the limitations of genre, were it not for the fact that some of the best American writing has been achieved through the tight focus of the hard-boiled novel. There is a north inside the human being, an icy expanse that shows both beauty and barrenness, but Busch seems to have shied away from that zone in this competent but ultimately unchallenging novel.
Siddhartha Deb's new novel, ''An Outline of the Republic," was published this summer. 
