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PARTISAN REVIEW
to rescue, or else to avenge lost or abused or murdered girls, often about the
same age as O'Brien's Mary, and some also raped by a father. For both writ–
ers, such crimes seem today's ultimate slaughter of innocence, the final
perversion of the caring instinct by our species. When the hero of
Girls,
a col–
lege security officer, gets involved in a search for a disappeared
fourteen-year-old, he says to himself, "I wondered if girls had been kid–
napped, murdered, preyed upon for years. Maybe it was the times, and
therefore everything human and otherwise from when he began might not
be at fault."
Jack's compulsion to find out what happened to Janice Tarmer has
obscure roots. He and his wife are still grieving for the loss of their own
child who had lived only a few months after her birth. She had never been
exposed to the dangers of growing into the vulnerable girlhood of the vic–
tims he comes across in his work-a suicidal student treated callously by
the professor who seduced her, a teenage runaway raped by her father, and
others whose faces appear regularly on posters and milk cartons. A friend
suggests he give the Tarmers some help-maybe it will even do him good
to do so-and for perhaps four-fifths of the book Jack tries to find a sus–
pect and only gets beaten up by a small-time drug hustler who has nothing
to do with the case. Jack's search, mostly conducted on hunch and impulse,
is threaded through the preoccupations of his job which also include a
possible plot to kill the Vice President, the imminent Commencement
Speaker. All the while, too, he is coping with the coming-apart of his mar–
riage and his attraction to another woman, with memories of his lost baby,
and with his more remote memories of death and loss in Viet Nam. For a
long time his own most continuous relation is that with his aging dog.
The place is a small campus in upper state New York. The time is
win–
ter-an enveloping weather of deep snow and cold which, rendered by
Busch's fine descriptive prose, seems to wrap the narrative in icy menace.
But as the weather softens the story comes out of its deep freeze and
Jack gets at the truth abut the Tarmer girl. Busch's novel-a whodunit, as it
turns out-is as "sensational" as O'Brien's in its own, quiet way. Janice had
not been abducted by a stranger but murdered by a trusted neighbor who
had made her his juvenile mistress, then killed her when she wanted to dis–
close their relation. As we are often told-but find it hard to believe--it is
most often a trusted adult friend or family member-especially a father or
almost-father-who is the destroyer. He had buried her in a cornfield now
covered with snow, but though spring was only weeks away no one want–
ed to wait for the snow to melt in order to find her: "We started clearing
the field with shovels and buckets and of course our cupped, gloved hands.
The idea was not to break any frozen parts of her away."
If facts-news or history or biography-inspire fiction, fiction is often
