No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home [Paperback]

Chris Offutt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2003

In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists.

Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt's parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following his 1993 memoir, The Same River Twice, readers and critics clamored for Offutt to recapture that success with a similar book. It's now been achieved. Offutt turns his impressive storytelling skills and unerring eye for detail on his journey back to the Kentucky hills, a seminal voyage in his 40th year to revisit his birthplace. He uses his considerable talents as a writer of short fiction to flesh out the colorful characters who populate the small community of Rowan County, recounting the quirky social and cultural rituals that distinguish it. "Never again will you have to fight people's attempts to make you feel ashamed of where you grew up. You are no longer from somewhere. Here is where you are. This is home. This dirt is yours," Offutt writes. Once he lands a teaching job at Morehead State University, which he graduated from 20 years earlier, his homesickness for big cities dissipates and he's no longer seen as an outsider. With his wife and children, Offutt struggles to move past tarnished childhood memories to forge a new life, savoring familiar places and faces while attempting to create a new identity as husband, father and mentor to his students. The book's high points are the painful yet eloquent recollections of his wife's parents Holocaust survivors who define the meaning of the words "heroes" and "home." Offutt's bold refusal to submit to nostalgic sentimentality, even as he admits defeat and forsakes his search for "home," and his skill as prose stylist set this book apart from the many homecoming memoirs.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This beautifully written book by the author of Kentucky Straight and other prose works actually comprises two interwoven memoirs. In the first, Offutt describes the year he returns to Rowan County, KY, to teach at his alma mater, Morehead State University, hoping to resume the life he remembers from 20 years earlier. In the second, Offutt's 80-year-old in-laws, both Holocaust survivors, recount their horrific experiences as Polish-Jewish prisoners of the Nazis during World War II. Offutt takes a risk by attempting to intertwine such disparate lives in one narrative. But he manages to carry it off successfully because what he is really examining is the concept of home, which for both the author and his in-laws is ultimately an illusion that can never be recaptured once it has been lost. Offutt's sparse prose elegantly reflects the people involved, whether the speaker is the author, his mother- or father-in-law, or one of his now-adult boyhood Kentucky friends. This rewarding read is recommended for academic and public libraries. Ruth K. Baacke, Highland Mills, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684865521
• ISBN-13: 978-0684865522
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,918,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not the story he intended to tell, April 20, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (Hardcover)

The story of author Chris Offutt's failed homecoming says a lot more about the author than it does about the place he tried to come home to. His disappointment that time has not stood still for 30 years, his naivete about the current realities of the region, his sulkiness over the absence of ethnic restaurants and other staples of city life, the arrogance of his intent to save Appalachia--all come through loud and clear. Not mentioned at all, of course, is the fact that he returns home only after having built a pretty good literary career out of pandering to the basest regional stereotypes imaginable.

Offutt does a fine job of connecting with the local landscape, for which he seems to hold a genuine affection--curling up into a fetal position in the woods, tenderly burying dead owls, and whatnot. But he is utterly incapable of connecting with the people who surround him, the people he says he wishes to save. The only exceptions are those who can reaffirm his romantic ideas about the past (his first-grade teacher, an old almost-girlfriend with whom he spends a wistful moment in the video-store parking lot, his childhood buddies all agog at his success) and those who feed his messianic fantasies (the student who makes the astonishing claim that there is no place where she can buy a dictionary, prompting him to give her his own rather than remind her that even drugstores sell dictionaries, never mind the university's bookstore). For the most part, he describes those around him with either belittling humor or such outright contempt that it's hard to imagine why he ever wanted to return.

Offutt places chapters describing his in-laws' experiences during the Holocaust throughout the book. These chapters, which seem to be transcriptions of their recollections--although the author's carelessness with matters of fact makes it difficult to know for sure--are the best of the book. Offutt himself admits that he's not really sure what they're doing in there, aside from the loose "can't go home again" theme. He claims no direct connection, but the presence of these voices raises a disturbing suspicion that the author perceives a parallel between their experiences and his own.

"No Heroes" brings to mind a quote from T. S. Eliot: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm--but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it--absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

Offutt may not have intended it, but "No Heroes" does harm. It's a shame that so many people will mistake this story of his neurotic misperceptions for a description of contemporary Appalachia. Anyone who reads "No Heroes" should follow it up immediately with John O'Brien's excellent "At Home in the Heart of Appalachia" as an antidote. Better yet, they should skip this one and go straight to the O'Brien.

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Offutt fools 'em again, April 9, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (Hardcover)

Offutt continues to convince critics and more than a few readers he knows something about Appalachian Kentucky. Anyone familiar with the area who reads this book will find out how little familiarity with the area he really has.

There are ludicrous factual errors (Morehead State University is _not_ the only four year college in the mountains), mistruths about people (one man he presents as being jealous that Offutt "escaped" Rowan County is as well-traveled an individual as I've ever met), and reported conversations that didn't happen (what "crossbow" in the film "Deliverance?"). He reports his local nickname is "Awful" Offutt, when in reality he's far more often referred to locally as "Outhouse" Offutt, for his weird tendency to insert outhouses in so many of his stories.

Offutt is warmed over Breese Pancake (and if you don't know who that is you owe it yourself to find out), a poseur, a complete and utter fraud.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Grossly inaccurate, April 16, 2002

By 

Literate Appalachian (Eastern Kentucky) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (Hardcover)

I made it through one chapter of NO HEROES which Offutt should think quite an accomplishment since I am from Eastern Kentucky and a graduate of Morehead State University. Not finishing the book has less to do with literacy or intelligence and more to do with an appreciation for accurate information (an appreciation clearly not shared by the author since he tosses around more fiction than fact). It seems quite tragic to me that someone with such a passion for "saving the uneducated" would now be so blatantly perpetuating the stereotypes he CLEARLY worked so diligently to overcome. I have found heroes all over Eastern Kentucky... my family, local educators, civic leaders, etc. However, I'm sure Mr. Offutt found NO HEROES here. He wasn't examining anyone but himself.