REVIEW: Year of the Buffalo by Aaron Burch

Novel. 190 pgs. American Buffalo Books. November 2022. 9780578394015.

We’re wrestling. We’re listing to CDs. We’re building a fence. Sorry, Fence. We’re raising Billy. Year of the Buffalo is a novel about brothers. Or maybe it isn’t?

What’s for certain are the uncertainties that seem to drive this narrative. Rhetorical question marks litter the prose. Exclamation points dot a fair amount of dialogue. Characters make decisions, but also they don’t? Maybe they are simply reacting to what’s happened to them? Who’s to say for sure?

If the reader is familiar with Aaron Burch, then you’ll find him in each of the characters. His quest to remember the late 80s and early 90s, from Stand by Me to Super Nintendo, is one he’s adventured for as long as he’s been writing.

As for the singular experience of Year of the Buffalo, it’s difficult to land on a specific impression. The characters are interesting but the scenes are not. The premise is enticing but the narrative seems dilly-dally, as if it knows where it wants to go next, but isn’t ready to leave just yet. The dialogue mirrors the experience of the two brothers in that it feels like we’re just trying fill the space between the beginning and the end.

Is a road trip game of this or that somewhere we need to be as readers? Does it matter that Ernie hasn’t read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Probably not, but the aimlessness of it all seems to be what Burch is most interested in as a writer.

When Holly visits an art museum in Seattle, we’re given a long preamble that leads her to this decision instead of just taking us there. A little after that, Scott gives us this line:

“Maybe sometimes wanting to know all your options before deciding is just an excuse to not make a decision.”

Decisions and non-decisions are the story of Buffalo. Whether it’s choosing the right campsite or stealing a hotel key card from the front desk, the novel feels much more interested in the preamble of those decisions and non-decisions rather than the consequences of them. For the reader, it also becomes about the decisions and non-decisions made by the author.

Burch teases us with interesting elements—Dead Wrestlers; a pet buffalo; hippies in the forest—but offers only glimpses. We return to Billy the buffalo when we’re with Holly, but he quickly turns mundane and quiet. It makes one wonder why the story is so keen to look backwards, when the present offers several elements to chew on. There’s a version of this book where the brothers never leave the farm.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is metatextual. Maybe looking at what could’ve been is a poor way to live. At one point, a writer named Burch wants to conduct an interview for the now-defunct website Grantland. Burch the author could have changed this to The Ringer, the successor to Grantland. It would’ve been a simple edit, but the decision not to feels very specific.

“Either thinking about nostalgia pushes me into zoning out, into Ernie’s World.” … “Or I zone out and then start thinking about the past and kinda get stuck there.”

Ernie’s World could have been Aaron’s World could have been this novel. Zone out, start thinking about the past, and maybe get stuck for a bit.