I've read perhaps seven or eight of Fred Busch's books by now. The first was the novel, Harry & Catherine, probably 20 years or more ago. From that book I was hooked. Sadly, many of Bushch's books are out of print now. Too Late American Boyhood Blues: Ten Stories is one of them, but I was lucky enough to find a copy at a lovely little used bookstore called Dog Ear Books, up in Northport, Michigan. Having read Busch's last posthumously published collection of stories, Rescue Missions, which was in many ways a rather "dark" look at life in general, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this much earlier bunch of stories seemed simpler, funnier, perhaps happier. Maybe it was its theme - the idea that American men sometimes take a very long time to really grow up. Because the protagonists in these ten stories are really still boys, whether they are nine or ten or in their thirties. There is an underlying (or sometimes quite overt) obsession with women and their various parts and sex in general in all of the stories, in a chuckling-to-laugh-out-loud fashion that probably might make women readers wonder if men really ever do grow up. I was pleased too, to find, in the story "The News," an early version or genesis of the novel, Harry & Catherine, my Busch starting point (and still a personal favorite). I was intrigued and charmed by the story "Critics," whose narrator was a ten year-old boy whose father was a "writer of nearly-successful novels," Busch's tongue-in-cheek poke at his own status as an author as he tried to imagine how life might have seemed or appeared to his own son. Another novelist protagonist shows up in "Making Change" in the person of Vinnie McManus, former Boy Scout troop librarian, single father of a teenage girl and sometime lover of Sheila, a strong, independent woman and high school librarian. Busch's wife Judy, incidentally, was a librarian, so there are then, quite obviously, a number of autobiographical elements in many of these stories.

I could go on, but suffice it to say I really ENJOYED every one of these stories. While there are certainly deeper things going on here too, this collection is mostly about boys, men and boy-men, all of them puzzling out the majestic mysteries of women and sex and wondering when they'll finally grow up enough to understand either of these. This is a great book. ( )