Frederick Busch's Girls is absolutely wonderful. It has this crazy rhythm; stop, start. Stop, start. It's got a "hard-boiled detective with a heart of gold" crime fiction thing going on, with dialogue that you can sort of picture men in fedoras saying out of the side of their mouths in a black and white film. At the same time, it's very wry and self-conscious (in a good way). And the subject of the novel itself is so excruciatingly sad and devastatingly drawn that it's hard to read sometimes.
It's a very different sort of novel from what I usually think I like. It's great.
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