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The Buffalo Soldier by Chris Bohjalian Recommendation: •••
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Reincarnation Chris Bohjalian rotates an ensemble of characters through the chapters of his new novel, The Buffalo Soldier. Each character faces some form of sadness and loss, and through real tension and deep feeling, Bohjalian brings those feelings to life. For each character, some life-changing event has occurred, and as readers, we aren’t sure until the end what path the renewed person will take, having survived crisis. Bohjalian presents the physical surroundings and forces of nature as having life of their own, and those forces lead to what becomes new life for certain characters. Here’s an excerpt: “Laura crumbled the toast over the macaroni and cheese in the casserole dish and slipped their dinner into the oven. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, a slim woman with hair the color of sand when the surf has just receded and a complexion as pale as the skin on the inside of her palms/ she was still in her mid-thirties, but her face and her eyes had been aged prematurely by grief, and she hadn’t felt her age in two years. She’d felt, always, considerably older. She stopped in mid-turn and tried to remember what it was that she wanted to do next. Clear away the catalogs that had come with the mail? Set the table? Pour Alfred’s milk? No, the casserole needed forty minutes in the oven. If she poured his milk now, it would be warm when they sat down to eat. Maybe she should get the carrots up from the basement. They still had summer carrots left in the sand barrel. She wished she had remembered to ask Alfred about his day at school. What he’d done, who he’d talked to. What they’d studied in social studies or history. Anything. Even whether he’d done his homework. She wished, she decided simply, that she wasn’t so out of practice at this, she wished there was some sort of muscle memory that went with parenting. She knew she hadn’t wanted him to wander up to the cemetery right now – except for school, when he wasn’t in her sight she grew worried and frightened – but she also wasn’t sure she could have stopped him (or, for that matter, whether she should have). If she told him to stay around the house, she feared he would just ignore her and go anyway. He had done that a couple of times when Terry wasn’t home. He’d treated her like she was a giant paper doll and simply disregarded whatever she’d said.” Laura and her husband Terry are grieving over the drowning deaths of their twin nine-year-old daughters two years earlier. Alfred is a ten-year old African American foster child who has just come to live with them. With great skill, Bohjalian places all the relationships in tension. Loss and recovery cycle through their lives. The title refers to a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Each chapter begins with a quote relating to the buffalo soldiers, especially one sergeant named George Rowe. Readers come to know all these characters and much of their pain as we journey with them toward their new lives through the pages of The Buffalo Soldier. Steve Hopkins, April 3, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2002 issue of Executive Times Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com