How to Kick Down the Door: On Aaron Burch’s “Year of the Buffalo”

Aaron Burch | Year of the Buffalo | American Buffalo Books | 2022

I’m someone who looks like my sister in ways I’d never think to recognize. We live together 350 miles from anyone we knew growing up. Recently, on a walk, a stranger greeted me with my childhood nickname, which I haven’t used since the seventh grade. This shorthand stopped me in my tracks. How did they know that version of me? Did they know my sister? A sibling is a kind of shadow archivist of one’s past self, a second curator. Faced with this parallel record, what else is there to do but pause?

For a story ostensibly about movement, Aaron Burch’s debut novel Year of the Buffalo lives in the pauses. Brothers Scott and Ernie take a road trip from Scott’s farm in Washington to a promotional event in Michigan for a video game in which Scott is the star. But much of the novel takes place in each brother’s imagination, where time is suspended. Ernie revisits childhood memories. Scott relives his pro-wrestling days. They have opposite motivations for looking backward. Ernie, recently separated, yearns for some purpose to reanimate his life. Scott, a former pro wrestler with a baby on the way, finds himself returning to the “Dead Wrestler of the Week” online message board, fretting over what might have been. The past appears alternately as a welcoming road to wander or an exit to speed past lest you recall it too clearly.

In a 2014 interview for Fiction Writers Review, Burch spoke about asking himself, for each of the stories that comprise his short story collection Backswing, “where’s that twinge of weirdness?” That weirdness, he says—by which he means “distinct gradations from realism to non-realism”—is what pushes a work beyond the trope of the relationship story. In addition to Backswing, Burch is the author of the memoir and literary analysis Stephen King’s The Body and the novella How to Predict the Weather. He’s also a founding editor of HAD, Words & Sports Quarterly, and has since resigned as founding editor of Hobart. He has made a name for himself by creating homes for the “domestic with a twinge of weird,” and Year of the Buffalo fits seamlessly into this tradition.

Structurally, the book is punctuated by lessons—“How to Take a Punch,” “How to Forget,” “How to Steal”—that provide a set of instructions we can trust, unless, of course, we cannot. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an easy comparison, but the two books might be more similar for Scott’s efforts to understand and categorize the world against Ernie’s attempts to break from those constraints. When Scott says everyone likes either the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, Ernie proclaims he likes Led Zeppelin better. The literalization of some of the major conceits of Year of the Buffalo, such as the ideas of masking and performance through Scott’s retired wrestling persona, Mr. Bison, evokes the burning in Kevin Wilson’s Nothing To See Here. And Ernie has a sprawling, anxious, sometimes dark interiority pulsing under a corporate exterior like a Talking Heads song. At one point, after walking past a dead doe on the road they will soon drive, Ernie says, “You know… A part of me doesn’t want to see that dead deer still there at all. But another part of me kinda can’t wait.”

Year of the Buffalo is interested in how its characters have constructed themselves and what happens when those foundations are shakier than they appear. On a mission to build planters before leaving for their trip, Scott and Ernie head to The Home Depot for lumber. They spend much of the errand lost in their own thoughts—Ernie thinks for a moment about letting Scott into his reverie, “asking if he remembered that night too,” but decides against it—but they come back together to realize they don’t have any of the equipment they need to cut or assemble the wood. It’s a scene that encapsulates the novel’s central question: what happens when the project of building a self is too big to be done alone? 

And what happens if you can’t always rely on your collaborator? Year of the Buffalo is a nostalgia tour, both of the brothers’ own lives and of a larger era, but misremembered histories dot the novel. Reaching for the movie title It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Scott asks Ernie:

“How many Mads in that title?”
“How many did I say?”
Scott shrugged, shook his head. 
Ernie said it again, “It’s a Mad, Mad World? It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?”
Scott laughed, showed Ernie his fingers. Seven.

Ernie doesn’t recall having seen the movie. Scott isn’t sure he has either: “I thought we did, but I was too young to remember… I thought you might remember.’” 

Each brother, at times, offers contradictory stories of their shared childhood. Scott remembers their mom growing vegetables in backyard planters their father built. Ernie does not. In these moments, the reader is positioned not as an arbiter, but as a witness to the kind of co-creation that’s possible in a relationship this intimate.

We might get lost in questions of authority if Burch had not included handholds with which to continually climb back to a plot. The book moves like a road trip conversation, diving somewhere soft and dangerous and then surfacing to visit Street Fighter II or a motel pool. When the novel threatens to tip into the stopped-time, daydream territory of what their father called “Ernie’s World,” where Ernie follows tangents about wolves or regret or The Legend of Zelda to their end, we are wrenched back to the reality that there’s something Scott isn’t telling us. Lurking throughout is Billy the buffalo, roaming from farm to house, appearing at the edges of the brothers’ attention like a half-remembered dream. The boundaries between what’s true, what’s imagined, and what’s cocreated are as disorienting and disquieting as a buffalo in the living room.

Though the brothers never fully turn their gaze away from the past, the momentum of the road propels them forward. They eye the future with curiosity, imagining all that a constructed self can do. Their project becomes one of “pictur[ing] the distance,” as the novel’s instructions enjoin, “between who they were and who they could possibly be.” Scott and Ernie are faced with the choice we all are once we recognize the self we’ve invented: you can let it pin you down, or let it take the wheel. How far can an invention take you? For Burch, the answer is to the edge of the map, then past it.