Shoot the Buffalo

Nine-year-old Aldous Bohm is relegated the task of watching out for his two younger siblings in the woods of Snoqualmie, Wash., where his family lives an edenic existence in the experimental '70s, his parents and Uncle Oliver, a Vietnam vet who inhabits their attic, doing drugs. That the youngest child, Adrian, dies of hypothermia when the three siblings set out desperately in the cold rain to look for their neglectful parents, leaves Aldous, who later enlists in the army, wracked by guilt. Aldous's parents' lack of ambition (and his uncle's antiestablishment rhetoric) results in his becoming a painfully judgmental adult. This first novel from short story writer Briggs feels cleanly bifurcated, as Aldous's coming-of-age alternates with his strenuous life in boot camp, where he is mocked for his conformity and meets his first love, sympathetic fellow soldier Janet. His visits on leave to his now divorced parents, living separately in Seattle in a kind of fuzzy lobe of amnesia, feel like a cheap shot, but on the whole Briggs offers an earnest, muscular indictment of the dropout counterculture. (Dec.)