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Discussion
Questions
1. Did you
find your sympathies shifting over the course of the
book between Harry, Catherine, and Carter? If so,
when?
2. Near the end of the book, after
Carter has buried the bones on Catherine's land, Harry
says, "That's what you get for digging things up."
Throughout the book, there are scenes of excavation
(the graveyard, the snake in the garden, even Harry's
scorched-earth apartment cleaning). How does this
imagery tie in with the ways in which characters deal
with their own "buried" pasts, with memories and feelings
they may or may not want to dig up? What connections,
for example, might one find between the graveyard
and Harry and Catherine's relationship?
3. What are we to make of the other
marriages and relationships presented in the book?
Are there any that seem particularly ideal?
4. How does Frederick Busch use
the setting (i.e., landscape, season, the details
of Catherine's house and land) to lend resonance to
the story?
5. Work and jobs figure prominently
in the novel. Harry uses his job to both get to Catherine
and get at Carter. Contrasts are set up between the
sort of work someone like the senator does and the
sort of work someone like Truscott John does, or,
perhaps more pertinently, between the work of Harry
and that of Carter. In addition, there is Catherine,
whom we never really see working at her job at the
gallery, but whose domestic work -- gardening, cooking,
and firewood chopping -- constitutes much of the action
of the novel. There's even Drown, who sees it as his
job to howl at the moon and follow everyone on walks.
Discuss the centrality of work and jobs (and the distinction
between the two) in the novel, especially in light
of Busch's own work, that of a novelist, and the fact
that he has written a nonfiction work about the writing
life entitled The Dangerous Profession. 6.
Similarly, issues of property and ownership run throughout
the story: ownership of the graveyard, Catherine's
bristling at the implication that either Carter or
Harry "owns" her, her fear of losing her sons. How
do these different ideas of ownership drive the story
and motivate the characters? John Locke argued that
one earns ownership through labor. What would Catherine
say to that in regards to her garden? in regards to
Harry's determined attempt to win her back?
7. Harry, like Busch, is a writer.
It's a surprise, then, to hear him say, "One thing
I've learned about words is how little to trust them.
Do what you need to do, and shut up." What are we
to make of this distrust? Perhaps think of the way
in which, though the novel is full of people who speak
their minds with wit and wisdom, the last scene in
the novel is punctuated with gaping lacunae and swerving
circumlocutions. Indeed, the talk -- and, therefore,
the book -- ends with a silent and somewhat ambiguous
response to a question.
8. Another way to look at Harry's
feelings on language is in relation to the attention
lavished on physical detail. Again, the book's closing
scene is a good example, but there are many other
scenes -- especially those in which Harry and Catherine
are cooking or gardening together -- where the deftness
of the dialogue is matched by the richness of the
sensual detail. Are there ways in which these scenes
validate, even enact, Harry's distrust of language?
9. Catherine's son Randy brackets
the novel, appearing at the beginning and, via phone,
at the end. He is away at college for the duration
of Harry's long second visit. When he returns for
Thanksgiving, Harry will most likely be gone. Is there
any significance to the fact that one's presence means
the other's absence?
10. What will Harry do now? Catherine?
Will she end up with Carter again?
11. Harry and Catherine is subtitled
"A Love Story." Near the end of the novel Catherine
tells Harry that she has not heard him say the word
"love" once during his stay. That is not true; he
has said it a few times. She, however, has not. What
do you make of this?
12. The word that Harry and Catherine
both use a little more often than "love" is "need."
How does Harry feel about the relationship between
love and need? How does Catherine?
13. Up until Bobby's accident with
the ax, Catherine seems to be leaning toward asking
Harry to stay. Afterward, however, she has decided
to send him away. What has spurred the change of heart?
How do differing definitions and attitudes about love
and need play themselves out in this final rejection?
Praise
for Harry and Catherine
"For years Frederick Busch has been at work on one
of the most impressive bodies of American fiction
-- an open-eyed, big-hearted, funny, savage (when
need be) and dead-true picture of domestic life. Here
in Harry and Catherine, he's reached a new
high-water mark. No one known to me in America is
writing better, more useful, more readable novels.
If you don't yet know him, here's a bountiful chance."
--Reynolds Price
"I think Frederick Busch
is a writer of great and generous gifts, and Harry
and Catherine is one more document in a growing
body of plain proof of this -- a record of sustained
excellence that deserves, that demands, our attention."
--Richard Bausch
"Harry and Catherine
is an eloquent story, lucid and vivid in its portrayal
of the journey of a man and a woman toward each other
-- it is a kind of pilgrimage, really-penetrating
and fluent in its evocation of love's rigors and its
bounty. Mr. Busch's tale is bright with comedy; his
sense of the ridiculous in human affairs, always just
and sympathetic." --Paula Fox
"[Frederick Busch] is expert
on the way work feels, and the way people feel about
their work. Nobody knows more than he about love and
the English sentence. Harry and Catherine is
a hurt joy of a book, a gritty celebration." --Janet
Burroway
"The world needs a lot more
of the deep feeling Frederick Busch's writing gives
us. . . . In Harry and Catherine, which brings
together a pair of appealingly vulnerable lovers,
Busch once again shows us an ideal for fiction and
for life: unsuppressed emotion, painful honesty, wit
to lubricate every encounter, and all of it in the
most lively and supple language anyone is writing
today." --Rosellen Brown
"Busch has succeeded here
in the task that Tolstoy set every writer: to grasp
the reader by the back of the neck and force him to
love life. Under the spell cast by this book, we do."
--Leslie Epstein
Also
by Fredrick Busch
FICTION
Don't
Tell Anyone
The Night Inspector
Girls
The Children in the Woods
Long Way from Home
Closing Arguments
War Babies
Absent Friends
Sometimes I Live in the Country
Too Late American Boyhood Blues
Invisible Mending
Take This Man
Rounds
Hardwater Country
The Mutual Friend
Domestic Particulars
Manual Labor
Breathing Trouble
I Wanted a Year Without Fall
NONFICTION
A Dangerous Profession
When Peole Publish
Hawkes
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