In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chris Offutt 561 Chris Offutt from The Good Brother In the August 16, 1998, issue of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Art Jester, the book editor, announced excitedly that Chris Offutt had moved back to his native Rowan County, calling him “the outstanding Kentucky-born writer of his generation.” He included a quick rundown of the forty-year-old writer’s achievements: teaching at the universities of New Mexico and Montana; three acclaimed books: Kentucky Straight (1992), a collection of stories; The Same River Twice (1993), a memoir; and The Good Brother (1997), his first novel; and coveted awards and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Jester quoted Offutt, who said that he had become so homesick he decided it was time to move his wife, Rita, and his two sons back to his Kentucky homeland. Offutt said: “For the last few years I felt that I wasn’t connected. Now I’m complete.” It was a beautiful dream. But it didn’t last; things were not the same. His hometown of Haldeman had all but disappeared. His childhood chums had gone on to other lives. Then the April 18, 2002, New York Times had a feature article on Offutt headed, “Learning Not to Trespass on the Gently Rolling Past”; there was a sidebar that read, “A Kentucky Son Finds the Hills No Longer Cradle Him.” Offutt was ready to move on again, this time to teach in the writers’ program at the University of Iowa. Noting that Offutt had stayed only one year, the Times concluded: “The experience burned his boyhood home to the ground like dry woods.” In his own book about the aborted move home, No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (2002), Offutt said it more effectively. You can go home again, he said, but you’ll live to regret it. Some Kentucky readers of the book were not very kind. In an April 13, 2002, column in the Herald-Leader, Cheryl Truman wrote that “Kentucky is used to being portrayed as a state of toothless illiterates,” but, she added, “What we are not used to is having Kentucky portrayed this way by a Kentuckian.” It’s dangerous for Kentuckians to be openly critical of their homeland. Nevertheless, Offutt’s magnificent talent for writing is a priceless gift to Kentuckians. In addition to the books already mentioned, there is a recent collection of short stories, Out of the Woods (1999), about Kentuckians who leave home and wish they hadn’t. The Good Brother is about Virgil Caudill, the good brother who, according to the code of the hills, has to avenge the murder of his hell-raising brother. The first chapter is just a start. h Virgil followed the rain branch off the hill and drove to the Blizzard post office. The mail hadn’t come yet and he continued past, giving a general 561 562 The Kentucky Anthology wave to the crowd that gossiped in the glare of April sun. He drove up a steep hill to the county line. It was only two miles from the house he’d grown up in, but he’d never crossed it. He parked by the edge of the cliff. The color of the air was brighter at the top. Clay Creek ran through the hollow with purple milkweed blooming in the ditch. When Virgil was a kid, he and his brother had walked its slippery bank, gathering enough empty pop bottles to buy candy when they reached Blizzard’s only store. Virgil wished he and Boyd could do it again but people had stopped throwing pop bottles away when the deposit rose to a nickel. The store closed when the owner died. Boyd was dead now, too. Virgil tried to imagine the land when it was flat across the hilltops, before a million years of rain chewed the dirt to make creeks and hollows. Clouds lay in heaps like sawdust piles. He figured he was seeing out of the county and he wondered if hawks could see farther, or just better. The world seemed smaller from above. The dips and folds of the wooded hills reminded him of a rumpled quilt that needed smoothing out. Cars were leaving the post office, which meant the mail truck had arrived . A titmouse clung to a tree upside down, darting its head to pick an insect from a leaf. Pine sap ran like blood from a wound in the tree. Virgil drove down the road...

Share