Girls (1997) by Frederick Busch

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Girls (1997)

by Frederick Busch

Hamilton, New York

New York: 13/105

Upstate New York: 12/23

    Man, I am going to be reading New York books all year.  Here we are in month two of 2024 and I'm still deep into Upstate/Hudson River Valley with New York City on the horizon.   This is the last of the eight books representing the swath of New York that covers Buffalo, Syracuse and the part of the northern state that isn't the Hudson River Valley.   This is detective fiction of a sort- the protagonist being an Ex Military Policeman now working as a campus cop for an upstate private university in a small New York town.

   Girls was the first book from upstate New York where I really felt the location: specifically the New York winter with its surfeit of snow- am I right in thinking that the confluence of the great lakes/distance from the ocean/lack of mountains creates literally the most snow of anywhere in the United States?  Syracuse is the snowiest city in the United States so I think I'm right about that.  I've noticed making my way through 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, that the emphasis is specifically on the PEOPLE of the United States, with the places themselves being secondary.  So far, the books that have been about place are either books about a single location- beach house, sanitarium, vacation house OR books that portray the life of a small town.  Girls was the first book where I really felt the snow of upstate New York, so credit to author Busch.

   Otherwise, Girls confronts a common issue in the attempt by editor Straight to portray the people of the United States: It involves many, many novels written about people from immigrant groups and the working/underprivileged classes of America, which means plenty of protagonists and narrators who lack a high school education.   How does the author address that situation?  The most common approach is to use the technique of a third party narrator who speaks for the (educated, sophisticated) writer of said characters.  The second most common approach- and this is what Busch does- is place that character in proximity to the educated, so that they can influence the narrative of the working-class/disadvantaged narrator.

  Here, the detective is a private security guard at an elite university, and he takes one class a semester.  Thus, the author is allowed some leeway when the detective character muses on a thing above his level of education/worldliness, "Must have been something rubbed off on me in my literature class."  OR the musings can be supplied by an educated character who exists for that purpose- also at work here.  I wondered if Busch started off to write a more conventional "campus novel" when he was struck by the idea of writing about a campus cop. 

  While Girls is certainly not the type of book I would have sought out beyond the precincts of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America,  I found it one of the more interesting books to emerge out of Upstate New York, since it wasn't about the difficulties of a young girl trying to make her way in a hostile USA.