The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie ,Washington , "to reinvent the American family." The Bohm's are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America . Their makeshift pastoral takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and romanticism taking the family deeper into the woods to destroy them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the buildup to the first Gulf War. Sweeping in scope yet unerringly precise in its detail, Shoot the Buffalo conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with its stubborn twin - the Romantic ideal of nature - to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Nine-year-old Aldous Bohm is relegated the task of watching out for his two younger siblings in the woods of Snoqualmie, Wash., where his family lives an edenic existence in the experimental '70s, his parents and Uncle Oliver, a Vietnam vet who inhabits their attic, doing drugs. That the youngest child, Adrian, dies of hypothermia when the three siblings set out desperately in the cold rain to look for their neglectful parents, leaves Aldous, who later enlists in the army, wracked by guilt. Aldous's parents' lack of ambition (and his uncle's antiestablishment rhetoric) results in his becoming a painfully judgmental adult. This first novel from short story writer Briggs feels cleanly bifurcated, as Aldous's coming-of-age alternates with his strenuous life in boot camp, where he is mocked for his conformity and meets his first love, sympathetic fellow soldier Janet. His visits on leave to his now divorced parents, living separately in Seattle in a kind of fuzzy lobe of amnesia, feel like a cheap shot, but on the whole Briggs offers an earnest, muscular indictment of the dropout counterculture. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School When his parents and uncle leave nine-year-old Aldous Bohm and his two siblings alone in the woods, he panics. Instead of staying within the warm security of their cabin, he drags his siblings into the cold, rainy woods to search for the adults. The children pass out from exposure, and while Aldous and his brother survive, their sister dies. What follows is the heart-wrenching aftermath of responsibility and recovery. The parents, who live in a marijuana-induced fog, take no responsibility for their daughter's death. Aldous takes the blame and searches for answers everywhere: at school, in the Boy Scouts, at church. Telling the story through the eyes of a child is ambitious, but Briggs handles it delicately by displaying a unique balance between naïveté and wisdom. When Aldous reaches his 18th birthday, he commits the ultimate rejection of his parents' lifestyle: he enlists in the army. During training in Texas, he enters into his first relationship with a woman and begins to deal with his past. The chapters flip back and forth between Aldous the boy and Aldous the young man, with his childhood echoing his later life in complex and moving ways. The novel functions partly as a reflective critique of the counterculture lifestyle, but also as a hopeful coming-of-age story. Teens will relate to the protagonist as he takes those first steps into adulthood. Beautifully told and filled with characters of real depth and struggle, the story shouldn't be missed. Matthew L. Moffett, Ford's Theatre Society, Washington, DC
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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More About the Author
Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs's zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest.
Briggs has won a number of prizes. His novel, Shoot the Buffalo, was award an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2006. He has also won The King County Arts Commission Publication Prizer, the Nelson Bentley Prize in Fiction, and the Hugo Gift Award from Richard Hugo House. The Stranger awarded Briggs the first Stranger Genius Award in Literature in 2003.
Briggs has won a number of prizes. His novel, Shoot the Buffalo, was award an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2006. He has also won The King County Arts Commission Publication Prizer, the Nelson Bentley Prize in Fiction, and the Hugo Gift Award from Richard Hugo House. The Stranger awarded Briggs the first Stranger Genius Award in Literature in 2003.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stolen childhood,
By
This review is from: Shoot the Buffalo (Paperback)
Early in "Shoot the Buffalo," a little girl dies due to parental neglect, but her brother blames himself. As a result, his childhood is also stolen from him. Without trustworthy parents to shelter him, Aldous searches for meaning in highly structured groups like the Boy Scouts and eventually, the Army. His story reminded me of the autobiographical struggles of author Tobias Woolf as told in "This Boy's Life" and "The Barracks Thief." In both cases the highly regimented, uniform-wearing organizations are just as stressful for the narrator as the bad parenting of earlier years. The spirit struggles to survive in unfriendly conditions. "Shoot the Buffalo" also made me think of another novel set in Washington state, Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping." That novel is also narrated by a child who has unconventional parenting and is haunted by the memory of a beloved sibling. Both Briggs and Robinson evoke the green, damp, forested Washington landscape and see it as a place of dread as well as a place of beauty. Briggs' writing explores physical and psychological landscapes with equal intensity.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing story,
By
This review is from: Shoot the Buffalo (Paperback)
Shoot the Buffalo is my kind of fiction. A coming of age story set in the dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, it features some of the saddest, yet oddly compelling characters I've read in a long while. I loved it. You will, too! Read this book!
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Same Old Stuff,
By Vincent Czyz (New York City, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Shoot the Buffalo (Paperback)
I gave this book a shot because I thought the author might have matured after this first book, which was pretentious and fairly boring. I was wrong. For one thing, he's right back to the same old autobiographical material--poor kid being raised by his irresponsible stoner parents. This one may be even more autobiographical since, hoping to find the structure his parents never gave him, the main character joins the Army (as did Briggs himself). But once again, the writing is thin although it hopes desperately to be mistaken for writing with depth. And once again the characters are weakly drawn. There's a little more plot this time, but not nearly enough to salvage the book. The cover is unwittingly apropos: it is flat, dimensionless, cartoonish, and overall unappealing--very much like the writing in this book. I suppose I shouldn't count him out as an author just yet, but after two one-star books, I have serious doubts.
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