Frederick Busch - Girls

10: What role does Professor Piri play in this drama?

11: Fanny is repeatedly described as capable and competent, and of course, her job is one of helping to save lives. Juxtapose this with the circumstances and aftermath of their daughter’s death, and discuss what effect this combination has had on Fanny.

12: As this is a work of fiction, the writer could do with his characters whatever he wished. Why do you think the author let Jack get beat up so badly?

13: Jack and Fanny’s marriage is a paradox: two people who love and are bound to each other, and yet cannot seem to live together. Discuss this paradox and why it exists. Do you know anyone with such a paradox in their lives? What is it like, and how do they resolve or live with it?

14: Why do you think Jack found Rosalie Piri so irresistible? He obviously loved Fanny and really wanted to make it work with her; yet he barely hesitated before he got involved with Rosalie. What do you think motivated him, or prevented him from resisting the affair with her?

15: Why didn’t Jack drag Fanny in to talk to Archie? Why didn’t Archie push for them to get counseling together? Many people in our society often resist counseling when they most need it. Why do you think this is so?

16: Jack goes into the Tanners’ church, and still finds himself unable to pray. Yet he really wants to. Why can’t Jack pray?

17: Identify all the different girls in the book who could contribute to the book’s title. What do they all have in common? How do they differ? Do you think Girls was a good choice of title? If not, what might you have named the book?

18: Why does Jack harass William, the drug dealer from Staten Island? Jack knows he’s not really guilty, at least not of being involved in the Janice Tanner case. Yet he knowingly beats him, and quite brutally at that. Why would Jack, who is basically a good man, do such a thing?

19: What do you think was the author’s purpose in including the subplot about the vice president’s impending visit?

Frederick Busch is the author of twenty-seven books. Girls was a New York Times Notable Book. He has received the PEN/Malamud Award in short fiction, and, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Award of Merit. His books have been finalists for the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Awards. He and his wife live in upstate New York.

“ Girls is about as close to perfect as a novel gets. Its prose is clean and strong but never advertises its own quiet brilliance, its characters are sharply defined and irresistible, and its plot is suspenseful enough to keep you up until dawn.”

— Men’s Journal

“Combining the quick pace of a detective story with the bold poetics of literary work, Frederick Busch’s taut new novel, Girls , is a dark, compulsively readable drama.… From the makings of an all-too-common evening-news item, Busch has fashioned a novel of considerable weight and dimension. By imbuing the lurid with the introspective, he has given a stock story intelligence, humanity, and terrific range.”

— Elle

“When a book is this successful it’s impossible to detect any sign of artistic struggle.… Jack is such an absorbing and sympathetic narrator.… nothing [Busch] has published in the past has quite prepared me for the seductive beauty of this very disturbing book.… Its pitch-perfect dialogue, skillfully contrived plot, and authentically wintry atmosphere are all exceptional, but a great deal of its strength comes from the moral complexity of its characters.… The highest compliment a reader can pay a literary thriller — or any novel, for that matter — is to claim that the book is nearly as intricate and mysterious as life itself, that the reader has lived in the book as if it were a particularly lifelike dream, and cared about its characters as if they were real. All these claims are true about Girls. ”

— The Washington Post Book World

“It is a dark tale, but it’s told with an economical mastery and intensity that only a few current novelists can command. Busch even manages to create a dog who is real, touching but never cute, and the perfect life-enhancing foil for the human sorrows around him.”

— Publishers Weekly

“The novel’s social realism gives it the page-turning pace of a mystery. But Busch’s masterly pairing of dark wit and tender mercy is what makes Girls a great work.”

— Us

“This well-written and engrossing novel is part mystery and part exploration of how grief can manhandle a marriage.”

— Booklist

“ Girls is about pain and what happens when pain can’t find its way out of the human vessel.… Girls is unusually entertaining.… In the end, this is a chilling story about the guilt of adulthood.”

— Time Out

“Though the crime story is intriguing, it is Jack’s growing insight about his marriage, his town, and himself that transforms this page-turner about lost children into a tender and eloquent examination of the even greater mystery that is the human heart.”

— Glamour

“Fierce, wise, gripping and true, Girls marks the continuing evolution of a first-rate American storyteller.… the triumph of Girls is in its clear-eyed compassion for all those who try to flee from the bedrock realities of their lives.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“A complex and disturbing vision of the world as a place filled with danger powers this fascinating novel.… It all works superbly as a conventional thriller, though the story’s most effective as a harrowing expression of the fragility of our defenses against loss and death, and a moving characterization of its memorable protagonist, a decent man who struggles against powerful odds to remain one.”

— Kirkus Reviews