DATE: Sunday, May 4, 1997                   TAG: 9704300712

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY LENORE HART 

                                            LENGTH:   78 lines

TROUBLED PROTECTOR GETS A CHANCE AT REDEMPTION

GIRLS

A Novel

FREDERICK BUSCH

Harmony Books. 279 pp. $23.

Imagine ``(y)ou're a small person, a little girl person, and you go outside but where it's supposed to be safe . . . And people come and they hunt you.'' This nightmare scenario is the reality law enforcement and parents face when a child goes missing. In Girls, a novel by PEN/Malamud and National Jewish Book Award recipient Frederick Busch, lost daughters generate desperation, grief, and - perhaps - a chance at redemption.

Jack is a Vietnam vet and a security guard at a pricey upstate New York college. His wife Fanny is an emergency room nurse. Jack protects students from outside harm, and from each other. He rescues other people's children from stalled cars, fistfights, small-time dealers, the odd suicide attempt. He's good at it, a terrible irony not lost on a man who couldn't save his own daughter. Hannah died in infancy, the official diagnosis SIDS.

He and Fanny are passing strangers who only connect to discuss mundanities: ``We saw each other when she was coming home and I was heading out. I timed my leaving for work so we'd say hello. `Good morning,' we'd say. We'd sing it, prove we weren't angry or embarrassed or scared. The dog got a little confused about who was supposed to feed him breakfast.''

The best marriage they can manage is an uneasy cease-fire. Neither can bear to discuss Hannah; neither can bear to let go.

Jack, who fills off-duty hours with English courses, is annoyed and amused by faculty perception of him: `` `You are not an unintelligent writer,' my professor wrote on my paper.'' He can still summon humor. Answering a dead-battery call from the same prof one bone-chilling night, he watches the man leave and mutters, ``You are not an unintelligent driver.''

Professor Strodemaster is an LL Bean kind of guy titillated by his notion that Jack, a former MP, might have killed in the line of duty. When Jack completes his ``Rhetoric and Persuasion'' assignment by turning in ``Ralph the Duck,'' a story about a featherless duckling he once dreamed up to whisper to Hannah, Strodemaster gives him a ``D.'' But he expresses admiration for Jack's skillful handling of student crises, and persuades him to conduct an unofficial search for a missing 14-year-old.

Janice Turner is a minister's daughter, a model teen-ager who never gave cause for concern. So police assume she was abducted and is probably dead. Her mother refuses to give up hope. Jack wants desperately to find Janice alive; or at least discover her fate. He needs catharsis, expiation for Hannah's death.

Girls explores how people become willfully blind in relationships to protect their loved ones, to protect themselves, to preserve the imperfect but comforting status quo. As Janice's parents maintain they know everything about her, Jack agonizes: Does he know his wife? Himself? Delving deeper, he can no longer pretend any relationship is what it seems - especially his marriage and brief parenthood. The mystery of Janice pokes at the painful secrecy that covers Hannah's death like a scab; inevitably, Jack will be pushed to his limits.

One subplot, involving a threat to the life of a visiting vice president, seems calculated simply for academic atmosphere. But overall Girls is well plotted, almost flawlessly crafted. Jack's voice is true, heart-wrenching.

Confrontations abound: tense, low-key exchanges between husband and wife; delicate negotiations with suicidal teen-agers who believe they're already burnt out or doomed. Mixing tense thriller with crystalline characterization, Busch relays that our defenses against loss, pain and death are weak; that guilt is sticky, webbed, far-reaching; that dark knowledge suppressed by misguided love will corrode a relationship as surely as blatant infidelity.

Jack is decent, good at his core. He struggles hard to save his essential humanity. In the face of tremendous odds, can he salvage his life? The odds against him are powerful. By story's end, the outcome is up for grabs. By refusing to provide a gift-wrapped ending, Frederick Busch re-creates life. His narrative realism, mastery of character, dialogue and motivation are vivid, haunting, hard to beat. A warning, especially to parents: Girls is impossible to lay aside and forget. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' is a novelist who

lives on the Eastern Shore.

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