ABSENT FRIENDS by Frederick Busch (New...

ABSENT FRIENDS by Frederick Busch (New Directions: $11.95). The emotional tone of these prize-winning short stories is as bleak as the wintry Northeastern landscapes where they are set. Busch’s elegiac tales describe friends and family members who have somehow failed to live up to their promises and expectations. After his wife commits suicide, a well-intentioned father struggles to understand his troubled teen-age son in “To the Hoop.” A weary, embittered maintenance man tries to prevent the suicide of a heart- broken college student in “Dog Song.” In “Orbits,” a young married woman visits her aging parents and discovers them “surrounded by the house that they once had run but that now, with its demands for paint and new plumbing, its dampness in the basement, squirrels in the eaves, was running them. Around them, the grass rose to challenge their tenure, and the moths, as darkness came, beat with big wings at the screens on the kitchen windows.” Well-crafted but cheerless prose from a skillful writer.