The Buffalo Soldier
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Exploring the trials and triumphs of an all-American family
INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE
The birth of every good novel requires an unexpected alchemical moment when imagination transmutes experience. For The Buffalo Soldier, Chris Bohjalian's moving story of a vulnerable foster child and the grieving family that takes him in, the moment seems to have arrived when Bohjalian looked at his daughter's kindergarten class picture and imagined something different.
"There were 16 adorable white kids," Bohjalian says during a call to the tiny Vermont village where he lives, "and not a single African American, not a single Asian American, not a single Latino child. There are many things I cherish about Vermont, but its homogeneity is not among them. I grew up in and around New York City. My nieces and nephews are Asian American. I thought to myself, What must it be like to be different in this environment? That led to the creation of Alfred Benoit, the 10-year-old African-American foster child who is part of the ensemble cast of this novel." Until that moment, Bohjalian had been searching for a way to make fictional use of his experience of a nearly cataclysmic flood that swept through his town some months before. "On June 28, 1998," he relates with reporterly calm, "after four weeks of rain and about four inches in one hour, the usually lazy New Haven River overflowed its banks and caused colossal damage in my corner of central Vermont. There were 40-foot chasms in the road. My village of 1,000 people was completely isolated for 72 hours. The roads were gone. The electricity was gone. The water supply was gone. The amazing thing was that no human beings were hurt, because the worst of the flood occurred at 1:15 in the morning, when no one was on these roads." In The Buffalo Soldier, Bohjalian masterfully evokes the deadly force of such floods not once, but twice. First in the tragic prologue to the novel, in which the nine-year-old twin daughters of Laura and Terry Sheldon are swept from the village bridge and carried to their deaths by the Gale River's raging waters. And again, in the book's dramatic culminating chapters. "Losing a child is the single worst thing that could happen to a parent," Bohjalian says when asked about the opening chapters of the book. "Writing the scenes involving Terry's and Laura's grief over the death of their daughters would leave me waiting at the bus stop for my own daughter to get off the school bus, just so I could give her a hug." In the novel, Laura Sheldon, who is unable to conceive another child of her own, convinces husband Terry, a Vermont state trooper, that taking in a foster child will help them move forward as a family. Unfortunately, the arrival of Alfred Benoit, a sweet, withdrawn, friendless little boy, has the opposite effect on Terry. Unable to deal with his own grief or the arrival of a new child, Terry has a shattering and guilt-ridden affair with another woman and at the same time grows increasingly suspicious and authoritarian with Alfred, while Laura tries somehow to hold things together. "One of the caseworkers I chatted with while researching and writing this book," Bohjalian says, "found it absolutely wrenching that Alfred is in a home where one parent works at an animal shelter caring for unwanted animals and the other is the ultimate scary authority figure for a foster child." Bohjalian explores the fraught intersections of this wrenching situation with remarkable insight. The conflicts and tensions in the household grow increasingly difficult, and Alfred finds some balance and respite through a friendship with the older couple that lives across the street. Paul Hebert, a retired historian, gives Alfred a book about the heroic African-American cavalry troops known as buffalo soldiers. The grateful boy finds solace and inspiration in the book and turns increasingly to the older man and his wife for advice and understanding. As the friendship deepens, Paul teaches Albert to care for and ride a horse named Mesa. "By design, The Buffalo Soldier is about multigenerational love," Bohjalian says. "I hope it illuminates the fact that friendship can transcend age." Not only does the book do that, but through the sympathetic portrayal of the widely varying perspectives of its ensemble of characters, The Buffalo Soldier sheds light on the whole question of what constitutes a family in contemporary America. "I write domestic dramas," Bohjalian says. "Sometimes that term sounds pejorative, but that's not how I mean it. I write about ordinary people in what I hope are extraordinary circumstances." To bring this particular drama to life, Bohjalian decided to return to a third person narrative voice for the first time in 13 years. The choice allows him to range deeply through the interlocking personal and familial conflicts of his cast of characters, then, somehow, bring them to a dramatic and satisfying conclusion. That fact will not surprise readers of such previous Bohjalian novels as Trans-Sister Radio (2000) or Midwives (1997), an Oprah Book Club selection. "Becoming an Oprah selection was wonderful," he says when asked to comment on the recent literary brouhaha involving Oprah Winfrey and The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen. "Writers want to be read; that's why we write. All of a sudden I got a lot more readers. What Oprah's done for reading is nothing short of amazing. It's a great gift to popular culture." In conversation, it becomes obvious that Bohjalian maintains a very busy literary schedule. He is just putting the finishing touches on his next novel, is preparing for the book tour promoting The Buffalo Soldier and continues to write a weekly column for the Sunday Burlington Free Press, as well as an occasional magazine article. But Bohjalian is quick to add, "Of all the roles in my life, the role I cherish most is being a dad. I just love being a dad. In fact, The Buffalo Soldier is dedicated to my daughter Grace. She's very flattered. She's eight going on Natalie Wood." Then, pointing again to the ways in which life and literature converge for him, he says, "I began riding horses two years ago while researching The Buffalo Soldier. Before I went to my first lesson, I asked Grace if she wanted to join me. What little girl doesn't love horses? She just jumped at the chance. I hope we will continue to ride together for many, many years. I hope that will be one wondrous result of writing this book. One more thing for my daughter and me to do together."
Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.
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