Long Way from Home

by Frederick Busch

"AM I YOUR MOTHER?" The headline screams out to Sarah from the pages of the personal ads. Suddenly seized with an "emergency feeling," she abandons her husband, Barrett, and their six-year-old son, Stephen, to search for her biological mother in rural Pennyslvania. Barrett, convinced through intuition that Sarah has gone to Santa Fe, deposits Stephen with his in-laws and sets off in hot pursuit. From these separate journeys begins a chain of events in which individual memories send a family in desperate search of itself--and the shattering truth that awaits them....

From the author of Closing Arguments .


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Frederick Busch (1941–2006) was the recipient of many honors, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, a National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award. The prolific author of sixteen novels and six collections of short stories, Busch is renowned for his writing’s emotional nuance and minimal, plainspoken style. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he lived most of his life in upstate New York, where he worked for forty years as a professor at Colgate University.

Reviews

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frederick Busch was one of my first (deceased) wife’s instructors at the U. of Iowa Writers Workshop. I had never read him and picked up this book not long ago. He was an excellent writer, in this book convincingly writing from the perspectives of a mother, a father and their 6 year old son, as well as a grandmother, a grandfather, and a birth mother. Unfortunately, the motivations of the actors are questionable: Why would an adopted mother leave home to find her birth mother without informing her husband or child? Why would the father, believing his wife went to Santa Fe, hop in his car and head there to bring her back rather than call the police. Why would grandparents, when they learn of these events not call the police? I also found the heavy reliance on dreams and explicit depictions of sexual encounters distractions from the basic plot.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out slow, but picked up steam as it went along. All the characters are far from home. The wife's story has an interesting arc; the husband just runs off the rails. Four stars for her story, two for his, makes three in the end.

[Timothy Bazzett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading this book on July 7, 2012, and wrote the following review then.

I'm still reading my through Fred Busch's entire oeuvre, having read maybe 20 of his books by now, and it hasn't yet become a chore, and I strongly suspect it never will.

I was pleasantly surprised to find Lizzie Bean again in LONG WAY FROM HOME. She's a free spirited independent soul who first appeared in ROUNDS (1979), then again in SOMETIMES I LIVE IN THE COUNTRY (1986), and now here. This time she's a mother and a grandmother, as well as a well-loved wife. She rounds out a cast of characters consisting of her (adopted) daughter Sarah, Sarah's husband, Barrett, Lizzie's newspaperman husband Willis, and a crazed "witch" named Gloria Dodge who claims to be Sarah's biological mother and stakes a claim on Sarah's small son Stephen, as her "rightful grandson."

Families and adoption are recurring themes in the fiction of Fred Busch, but they never wear thin. Busch's main interest is always the bond between parents and children, whether adoptive or natural, and he plumbs his subject effectively yet again in this book. The title comes from the old folk lament, "Sometimes I fell like a motherless child ... long way from home." There are elements of Hansel and Gretel, with witches and ovens and stolen children here. There are mysterious potions, gingerbread boys and girls, and there are even sly allusions to sticking pins in dolls. Like the woods in Hansel and Gretel, this story is dark, deep, frightening - and riveting. (There is also some kinky, pseudo S&M scenes here too, a subject Busch's imagination excels at. His CLOSING ARGUMENTS was drenched in it.)

But whether he is channeling Mother Goose or Marquis de Sade, Fred Busch is always - more than anyone else - Fred Busch. Like so many of his early books, LONG WAY FROM HOME will keep you up long past your bedtime, compelled to know what happens next. Great stuff!

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was reluctant to read this since I didn't like Busch's The Night Inspector. But I try never to judge an author by one book (especially an author who has written so many books!). I liked it a lot. I loved Busch's portrayal of Stephen, the too-wise 7 year old and his still-in-love grandparents Lizzie and Will. I feel conflicted about the other characters--Stephen's parents Sarah and Barrett and Gloria, Sarah's birth mother. But I guess it is partly that we enter the story when it is already in motion and don't have much of a chance to see why Sarah and Barrett are as they are. Barrett's behavior didn't make sense to me at times. The flashbacks help to some extent.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very slow to get to the story and the best part was the last part, more exciting then rest of book, since to took so long to get there...