Gregory Ellis received his MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts where he began his first novel Ride the Buffalo’s Back. His life experience also includes a BA in music from Amherst College and a JD degree from UCLA School of Law. In addition to working on his third novel, he also continues to practice law, and sings and plays guitar in local venues. He and his wife live in Los Angeles, and they spend as much time as they can with their children and grandchildren in Southern California and Oregon.
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The year is 1974.
President Nixon has just resigned and a cease-fire is in place in Vietnam. Richie Marchetti, a recent Yale graduate, leaves his day job as a metalworker in the central Connecticut factory town where he was born to join a successful road band, free now to focus on his music. But beneath Richie's outward journey is a nagging subconscious mission: the impossible rescue of his younger brother Tommy who died in Vietnam two years earlier. This futile obsession propels Richie into a world of fractured reality - a smokey borderland between mysticism and madness which thrusts him face to face, ultimately, with the ineffable power of surrender.
Sena Jeter Naslund
author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, and others
“I love this book. The writing about music here is some of the best I've ever seen. Reminds me of the way James Baldwin wrote about music in "Sonny's Blues," and like Baldwin, author Gregory Ellis offers a kind of salvation through music, as his main character, Richie Marchetti, a second-generation Italian-American, who has a diploma from Yale but sings and plays in a rock band, struggles to overcome the family trauma ─ the loss of a son in Vietnam.
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The shadow of Vietnam and the moral shambles of Watergate are all over this novel, from the opening scene of Nixon's resignation as viewed in a bar to the savage post-trauma destructiveness of the climactic scene. I don't think there's a post-Vietnam novel to compare to this one. Small parts of the book are set in Vietnam, but the story told here is mainly of the so-called survivors: of men who came back with scarred bodies and maimed spirits, and of men suffering a kind of purgatory who were the brothers and friends of those killed or damaged. And we hear a counterpoint to the men's story in the novel's women struggling for their own self fulfillment and trying to relate to the walking wounded.
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In Ride the Buffalo’s Back, another post-war lost generation is commemorated. I found this novel exceptionally memorable and moving.”
Jonas Zdanys
poet and author of The Thin Light of Winter, Tarpdury, Salt, The Woman on the Bridge, Five Lithuanian Women Poets, and other collections
“Ellis gives immediacy and presence to a range of characters and places in his exceptional first novel, creating for our delight and care, wonderful individuals whose personal transformations are mirrored by social and cultural transitions that changed our country and our lives in it in both catastrophic and redemptive ways.
Poignant, caustic, elegiac, erotic, and always engaging, Ride the Buffalo’s Back is an energetic and luminous meditation on war and peace, on the lives of individuals and the changing tides of social connections, on the incandescent power of art and the scarring burdens of history. This is a moving evocation, rich in moral conviction, of a chaotic time in the recent American past. It is among a handful of truly compelling depictions of those difficult times and of the familiar places and voices that still stir and haunt our common memory.”
