SOURCE: Hanstedt, Paul. “Plot and Character in Contemporary Fiction.” Shenandoah 47 (winter 1997): 128-29, 132-35.

In the following excerpt, Hanstedt expresses the importance of characterization and a well written plot in novels and, using this criteria, gives Busch's Girls a positive assessment.

Perhaps one of the best-known maxims concerning fiction comes from E. M. Forster, who, in 1927, wrote:

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. … If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?”

For Forster, in other words, “good” writing explored how individuals struggled within themselves—with grief, in the case of the aforementioned queen...