Buffalo

By Sydney Blair

Book Overview

Ray McCreary is a Vietnam vet, just forty, with inclinations -- startling to himself -- to settle down, marry the woman he thinks he loves, and have a child. He sets out on a journey to seek a kind of closure with a past lover and with Bullet, the buddy who got him through the war but who can't shake a lingering agitation. Not sure where he's going or what he'll find when he returns to the old Virginia schoolhouse he shares with Vivian, Ray is nonetheless driven into one last round of adventure, a quest for what he might be missing or what he might want to give up. With an eye for natural and human hazards -- copperheads and buffalo, the violence of men who never find their place, the shadow of the war -- Sydney Blair captures perfectly the eternal despair of some vets, the slow healing of others, in this moving novel.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670835544
• ISBN13: 9780670835546
• Release Date: March 1991
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 197 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A surprisingly subtle and terriific tale

To call this a southern novel is to minimize it, I believe. With a sure blend of dramatic, soft, and comic scenes, Blair captures the quiet murmurings and bonding rites of a Nam generation, the one between the Boomers and X- or whatever-geners, between NASCAR good ol' boys and white collar upper-mobilers, a lost tribe, drifting under the cultural radar, vets of that mistake whose search for meaning mirrors that of a larger society. The characters of this novel we know: manboys, many of whom earn their living unnoticed as the artisans of our age, some of whom have to go on the road one last time to find closure to they know not what, others who create faux totems to a mythic American past in their own surround, and others looking for that one last brass ring. In the main character we recognize his uncertainties in allowing the love he feels for the woman who loves him and grow with him as he eventually comes home to a new place. Isn't that what many good reads are about: coming home to a new place?