War Babies »

Frederick Busch's novel War Babies is a short, powerful moral tale that sheds light upon the insidious nature of evil and the grip history holds on the lives of the seemingly protected innocent. Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp—the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox—himself a survivor of the camp—can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.

Author Biography: Frederick Busch is the recipient of the 1991 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, an Award in Literature from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Woodrow Wilson, NEA, James Merrill and Guggenheim Awards. His novel The Night Inspector was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University, and has been the acting Director of the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Publishers Weekly

National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award-winner Busch ( Absent Friends ) here offers a short, gory Gothic novella centering on the goings-on of two fashionably thirtysomething lovers: Peter Santore, a dull-witted American lawyer who is in England trying to unearth information about his father (an American who, during the Korean War, turned informer); and Hilary Pennels, whose own father, a war hero, was perhaps betrayed by the elder Santore. Also figuring in the novel's none-too-plausible plot is a kinky former Sergeant-Major and Korean POW who, we are told at every opportunity, has rotting teeth, terrible breath and weepy eyes. He drinks, toasts ``absent friends'' and narrates war tales famous for their blood and guts. In this slim volume, Busch fails to reach his usual standard of imaginative pathos leavened by humor. Even his dialogue palls: remarks Pete of Vietnam War veterans, ``They had a really bad time,'' to which Hilary replies, ``Didn't we all.'' (Sept.)