Buffalo Nickel by Floyd Salas (review)

562 WesternAmerican Literature beyond the reach ofwritten language. Like the mirrors in Bageese’shome that provide glimpses of her bear identity, the language here presents tantalizing refractions from realms ofexperience that never entirely come into focus. But this effect ofsuspension between worlds ofdiscourse creates a curious poetry as well, in which conventional images of tribal cultures, nature, and reality itself are radically transposed. The novel’s messages are implicit in its paradoxical point of view, which integrates “voices” that are inherently untranslatable, so that decoding the perspectives of the various voices telling the narrative becomes part of the process of “reading.”The three major categories of “voice”are suggested in the opening chapter, “Shadows,”which serves as a fictional author’s preface to the tales thatfollow. Here the tribal storyteller Bageesewarns the scholarly narrator of the dangers of translating her stories into the “dead voices”of lectures and printed words. This introductorywarning about the difficultyoftranslating oral into written “hearing” is later compounded by the nature of the stories them­ selves, which originate in the tribal “wanaki game,”and which must be experi­ enced and told from a first person plural point of view, in which the human narrator’svoice is fused with those of the beings whose stories are being told. Bageese’s education of the narrator also prepares the reader for the uniquely conceived voice of the stories that follow: ‘The secret, she told me, was not to pretend, but to see and hear the real stories behind the words, the voices ofthe animals in me, not the definitions ofthe words alone.”Thus we are introduced to the wanaki game, in which the “we”ofthe stories become, in turn, the beings designated in the story titles. Despite the difficulties it presents to readers—or perhaps partially because ofthem—Dead Voicesis a humorous, original, and curiously eloquent contribu­ tion to contemporary Native American fiction, which translates onto the page living voices that finally can be heard. DAVID MOGEN ColoradoState University Buffalo Nickel. By Floyd Salas. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992. 347 pages, $19.95.) Floyd Salas’sautobiographical BuffaloNickels an impressive, often depress­ ing work that spans nearly fifty years, but which moves forward from 1933 to 1981 with the pace, tension, and engaging conflict of a complex novel. Two concerns dominate this work: the author’s steps and missteps leading to his accomplishments as a respected novelist, and his older brother Al’s steady decline from promising boxer into a life of crime, drug addiction, alienation, Reviews 363 and, arguably, moral decay. Focused mainly on life in Oakland, California during and after World War II, Buffalo Nickel is an honest, painful, startling portrait of the artist’s family; what Salas reveals is tragedy upon tragedy offset only by his literary triumphs and his final rejection ofhis brother’slifestyle. With crime, drugs, and boxing, suicide is a prevailing force in this book. Beginning with the suicide of another older brother, Eddy, an educated but ultimately troubled man, Salas recounts the details of seven more suicides. Three ofAl’schildren and a daughter-in-law kill themselves, and a fourth dies a gruesome, horrible death—heroin destroys the valves ofhis heart. Indeed, selfdestruction issomuch a partofhis life that the author admits “I had read a stack of books ... on suicide”to try to understand the legacy of death surrounding him. Salas’srelationship with his brother A1forms the core of this tale. Initially, the young SalasworshipsA1and follows him into the world ofboxing; however, soon SalasisfollowingA1into pettycrime and drugs. The author then details his failed efforts to help his older brother “go straight,” as well as his troubled decision, finally, to disassociate himself from Al. And without offering some easy, pat solution, Salas is equally honest in his description of a final, loving, brotherly attempt at compassion when Al must face yet another tragic death of a loved one. Buffalo Nickel is not an easy read. Despite its interesting glimpses into the seamier, deadlier sides of life in the ’50s and ’60s in Oakland and its environs, the tale of Salas and his family is near-Senecan with regard to death, betrayal, disappointment, disillusionment. No easy answers are proffered, no happy endings are suggested; yet...