No Heroes by Chris Offutt
Cahill, Elizabeth Kirkland
HIS OLD KEHTUCKY HONE Elizabeth Klrkland Cahlll Hives there a transplanted Southerner who does not dream of going home a hero? Having betrayed the values of continuity and family by crossing state...
...The soul that can resist the lure of going back both to make a difference and to atone for the original desertion is a lost soul indeed...
...In a different way, Offutt has escaped the self-degrading culture of the hills by leaving home...
...I was lucky...
...Arthur tells of the loss of an eye in the lunch line at one camp: "We are standing and-pow-the end of the whip takes my eye...
...Making peace with the past is, of course, an elusive process...
...Irene made dresses from burlap sacks so that people would look healthy...
...Of a spontaneous car ride with his old friend Harley, now a recovering drunk, he says, "He was not a forty-five-year-old alcoholic on the mend, and I wasn't his neighbor who left and came home...
...Thanks to a call from his old writing teacher, he "turns tail" for the more congenial intellectual and social climes of the University of Iowa...
...But the lucky pay a terrible price: Arthur is tormented by his lack of heroism, proven by the fact that he is alive...
...Or was it good story material...
...his motive and commitment are sufficiently shrouded by the narrative as to leave the reader as ambivalent as the writer...
...Chris's part of the book is rich in characterization, abundant in description, and full of detail...
...There was Mr...
...For Arthur, the past is dead, or should be...
...Offutt finds unsettling reminders of his past even in his students...
...For Chris Offutt, the chance to teach writing at his alma mater in the hills of eastern Kentucky was the lure...
...Whether or not Chris Offutt is himself a hero of the Kentucky hills is another matter...
...Nine-Mile has no conception of Chris's world, reckoning that it must take Offutt about a month to write a book because "that's when they change the paperbacks at Wal-Mart...
...I did terrible things...
...Here is the memoir's weakest point...
...I was blind from then on...
...The horrifying content of their memories lies at odds with the matter-of-fact tone in which those memories are shared...
...There is Sandra, who confesses that she's doesn't own a dictionary and has never been in a bookstore...
...As he says in the prologue to this unusual memoir, going back to Kentucky meant that he no longer would have to bother about "preplanned responses to comments about wearing shoes, the movie Deliverance, indoor plumbing, and incest...
...Many uneasily shake off the past on their way to becoming something better, more worldly, or famous, but it's no good...
...Irene says bluntly, "I am not an angel...
...It came over the back of the head...
...As it is, the experience of sharing his memories with Chris leaves him feeling terribly exposed, and is devastating to his daughter...
...Illuminating and contrasting each other, these narratives form an extended meditation on the meaning of the past and the function of memory...
...I want to leave...
...The reader may feel, as I did, that the account of Offutt's going in and coming out is incomplete...
...Kentucky's hill country, too, has its heroes...
...Arthur looked after the abused mistress of his camp boss...
...By Christmas break he is discouraged by his failures, despairing of his ability to change things, and worried about his young son's adaptation to a less-than-ideal school system...
...Having been betrayed by his past, he rejects it and looks fatalistically toward the future...
...he agonizes...
...Some things cannot be reconciled...
...On his way to the job interview at Morehead State, for example, he runs into the maintenance men with whom he worked in his student days...
...Offutt eventually helps her transfer to another college...
...Having betrayed the values of continuity and family by crossing state lines for adventures elsewhere, Southern expats long to make it right...
...Yet their ability to connect is lopsided...
...Arthur, for example, was in the half of the line that was not shot by the firing squad...
...On the street...
...There was the friend of Arthur's, Stella Goclow, who went to the camps to help Arthur's mother, and died there...
...Were there personal family reasons-scores to settle, peace to make-that led him homeward...
...In far less wrenching circumstances, his son-in-law comes to the same conclusion...
...What I want to know,' Billy said, 'is who told you they were hiring maintenance men to teach college?'" In the video store, he encounters Nine-Mile, who was a star athlete in high school and is now the father of seven children spanning twenty years...
...Offutt's admission of failure is couched in charming prose, but its sincerity is suspect...
...The SS...
...Of course there are heroes in this book, heroic in small, very human ways...
...Home, for Arthur, is an idea without meaning...
...His own family scarcely bears mention, a mere chapter apiece on his mother and his father...
...That's it...
...He feels unrighteous because he did not stand up for an ideal...
...Jayne, Offutt's first-grade teacher, who changed his life by teaching him to read...
...It is no haven, no comfort-giving memory, but merely a place in the present "where I hang my head...
...Stylistically, the narratives differ greatly...
...In returning home, Offutt comes face to face with his past...
...In fact, the two story lines, alternating in a relentless pattern throughout the book, work together beautifully...
...There is Eugene from Martin County, tattooed and pierced, who hates school, mistrusts teachers, and struggles unsuccessfully to break free of his world...
...It is not to be spoken of...
...The tip hit my eye...
...I want to stay home," Offutt says at the end of the book...
...Faced with the unspeakable difficulty of constructing a meaningful life as a survivor of Nazi atrocities, Arthur has chosen the only possible way forward: to leave the past behind...
...We have Irene's shocking account of her mother's death: "My mother was killed before my eyes...
...Into the unfolding drama of his life back at home, Offutt introduces what seems to be an unrelated narrative: first-person accounts by his father- and mother-in-law, Arthur and Irene, of their years in Nazi concentration camps...
...In both narratives, style perfectly reveals intent...
...Heroes are not human...
...There was Mrs...
...And did the call from the former teacher really come out of the blue, or was it the result of a conversation or two over the preceding months as the "hillbilly of the soul" realized what a disaster the place was and began seeking a way out...
...Ellington, the seventh-grade history teacher, who taught his students to take pride in Kentucky history...
...His voice was casual, as if we'd seen each other last week instead of two decades ago...
...Home is there, always, beckoning with guilt or promise...
...We were two Haldeman boys on the loose...
...All three narrators are survivors, of a sort...
...Why did I passively endure...
...Was he really so blinded by idealism that he didn't think about the inferior schools he would be subjecting his kids to...
...For Arthur and Irene, survival in the camps was random, luck that cannot be justified or explained...
...His wife wasn't wild about the area either, I'll bet...
...By the pistol...
...He is resolute in his refusal to visit his native Poland or to encounter any physical reminders of the horrors he has survived...
...He uses powerful images: "The afternoon sun leaned into the hills across the parking lot, surrounded by chain stores that manacled the land...
...By contrast, Arthur's and Irene's stories, transcribed from their conversations with their son-in-law, are stark and terse...
...His dropping out of school sends Offutt into a melancholic tailspin, for it confirms the persistence of the ghetto mentality: Achievement is betrayal...
...Anything might happen...
...Offutt is a seasoned traveler, an accomplished writer, and the father of two sons, but in the eyes of those he left twenty years earlier he is unchanged...
...The impression is that if the tellers were to let the lid off the emotions beneath the words, the power of the memories might kill them...
...He was spurred, he says, by the desire to "give back to the community...to teach writing in a region where thirty percent of people were functionally illiterate...
...The reader can easily picture him as the eight-year-old boy who biked wildly along animal paths and creek beds with his friends, or as the longhaired, alienated college student with protest buttons on his jacket...
...No heroes," Arthur insists when he agrees to tell his son-in-law his story...
...Again and again Offutt undergoes the reverse alchemy of home, which transforms you from the gold you think you've become to the lead you were before you left...
...And he is funny...
...Besides, he craved the relief of being among his own kind...
...He is constantly exploring his old haunts, trying to reconcile who he was with who he's become, working it out in his mind...
...There were the German women who stood up for Irene when she was on the brink of trouble for fashioning metallic Christmas ornaments in the factory line...
...If not, to the clinic and you die...
...The librarian, Frankie Calvert, allowed him to circumvent the book limit by taking out books in the name of the family dog...
Vol. 129 • September 2002 • No. 16
