Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Chris Offutt: The Good Brother

Chris Offutt The Good Brother Carl Wieck A Biographical Sketch Much of what is known of Chris Offutt has Chris Offutt as its source, via memoirs , interviews, and biographical sketches. The following brief biographical information is indebted to much of that material. Offutt was born in Kentucky on August 24, 1958, and grew up in Haldeman, a small Rowan County town in Appalachia that had clay mining as its main source of jobs and income. His parents, Jodie and Andrew J. Offutt, had moved there from the larger city of Lexington. When the mine was closed down, the town also died, but Offutt’s work is deeply rooted in the people and atmosphere of that town and region. In order to free himself from what he experienced as Haldeman’s claustrophobic environment, Offutt attempted to enlist in the military, but failing the physical, he turned to Morehead State University as his best alternative escape route. Art and theater were his main interests at Morehead, and there followed several Wanderjahre during which he lived in a number of different states, ranging from Massachusetts to Florida, from Montana to New Mexico. Along the way he found employment in more than fifty temporary jobs, including dishwashing , carnival work, carpentry, and house painting. About age thirty he married Rita, and with her encouragement, at a time when the young couple’s backs were to the wall in Kentucky, he applied to and was accepted by the prestigious University of Iowa creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop . A book of short stories, Kentucky Straight, named for Kentucky straight bourbon, opened the door to major publishing as well as a Guggenheim grant and other important awards, including those from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since then Offutt has tried his hand at memoirs (The Same River Twice, 1993, and No Heroes, 2002), a novel (The Good Brother, 1997) and more short stories (Out of the Woods, 1999). More recently his efforts have extended to fantasy writing (in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, 2003), comic book writing (“Another Man’s Escape,” 2005) and, currently, to television writing (Tough Trade and True Blood), editing (Top Chef ), producing (Tough Trade), and coproducing (Weeds). He also played the role of “Charlie” in the film The Slaughter Rule (2002) and starred 120 Carl Wieck in the Resist Evil trilogy. From his credits it would appear that television work is now paying the bills for Offutt, much as Hollywood script writing once did for Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Although Offutt paints Iowa as the place where he shaped his craft, it may have been with his father back in Appalachia where the bug first bit. Andrew Offutt wrote and published prolifically in the areas of science fiction and fantasy , as well as pornography, with his wife contributing to the effort by doing most of the manuscript typing. Chris Offutt does not credit his father with stimulating his interest in serious writing, although he praises the work of many other Appalachian and regional writers. But when his father gave up a profitable insurance business during Chris’s youth in order to become a free-lance writer, the son was almost certainly aware just how precarious that decision might turn out to be. We thus find in Chris Offutt’s father an immediate family precedent for the risky writing profession the son has chosen, if not a precedent for the son’s choice of subject matter. At this writing Offutt’s own sons, Sam and James, are moving into adulthood ; he himself is married to Melissa Ginsburg and is actively engaged in television work. He has promised two further novels, one to precede The Good Brother and one to follow it. At last sighting Offutt could be found in Los Angeles. The Good Brother Chris Offutt’s The Good Brother is a lovingly written tale that seems beholden in many ways to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We are given, for instance, a backcountry hero who is shown to be a naïf with native survival wit. Virgil Caudill exists in the tradition that gave birth to Huck, as a stubborn loner who manages to pivot away from difficult encounters while maintaining internal integrity. Facing up to his upbringing, and because the revenge tradition of his hills demands it of him, he feels obliged to kill Billy Rodale, the man who is assumed to have killed...