Customer Reviews

No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

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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.

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.

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.

Chris Offutt is a talented short story writer (KENTUCKY STRAIGHT, OUT OF THE WOODS), and The New Yorker magazine praised his 1993 memoir, THE SAME RIVER TWICE, as the "memoir of the decade." Although his latest "memoir of coming home" may be read as a sequel to his earlier memoir, it is not the same old RIVER. In NO HEROES, we follow Offutt back to the Kentucky hollows of his youth where, at age 40, he has agreed to teach creative writing at his alma mater, Morehead State University. Much of his memoir moves back and forth between the familiar places and faces of his childhood and the realities of his adult life as a husband, father, teacher and writer. "Depending on how you counted," he writes, "I'd been gone five years since my last visit; ten years since getting married and living a few months on my home hill; or twenty years since I'd hitchhiked into America. To my neighbors I'd never left, but merely been visiting away for a spell" (pp. 40-1).

Offutt's memoir not only shows that you can't go home again, but just how difficult it can be thinking you can. He discovers "home is a feeling, nothing more. Home is illusory, like love, then it disappears. Once you leave, you become a stranger" (p. 266). At one point, we find Offutt drinking beer with his old friends. "We lied about the present," he observes, "reminisced about the past, and utterly ignored the future. We repeated ourselves endlessly . . . I was reliving childhood from the other end . . . wishing time had halted twenty-five years ago at the apex of innocence" (pp. 163-4).

Like his other writing, Offutt's memoir will make you laugh, and it will make you cry. Although you may not find any heroes along the way, you will meet folks in this anecdotal memoir as interesting as any of the characters that populate Offutt's short stories. In a distracting way, Offut intertwines his own story with the Holocaust story of his in-laws, Arthur and Irene--my only real criticism of the book. In the end, I favor Offutt's earlier work more than NO HEROES.

G. Merritt

According to Mr. Offut, I shouldn't have been able to spell "egocentric." I grew up in the same region as the author, but still managed to learn how to read. Unfortunately, that ability led me to read his book.

Given the opportunity to begin again, I wouldn't waste the time and effort it took to pick up this book, never mind reading it. The only thing that kept me turning pages was the curiosity of how he would make the next topic all about himself.

Too bad he missed all the lovely things about eastern Kentucky while he was obsessing over what everyone thought of him. Mr. Offutt -- take a lesson from Rick Bragg about how to write a memoir with compassion and insight into the culture he is describing.

Offutt not only has a way with words, he has a wonderful way of shoving truth right up into your face, like it or not. I grew up in Rowan County, went to the same grade school, high school, and even college that he did. This book skips some of the beautiful parts of living there -- the countryside, the safety, and the freedom from crowds, traffic, and excessive rules. But it uses humor, coincidence, and perhaps a bit of hyperbole to dramatically demonstrate some of the major problems.

One of the biggest problems with Appalachia is the deep cultural bias against education. When I was in fourth grade and bored, I took a book to school to read during study hall. The teacher told me that "reading was a waste of time" and I "wasn't able to read chapter books anyway". When I got to high school, again in college, and especially in graduate school, each time I found I was more than a year behind my classmates. It's clear that one of the major tickets to success in America is education -- our immigrants from China and India know that, why is it that so many Americans have trouble accepting it? And why do residents of one of the most educationally depressed areas in the country get insulted enough to rant and rave against an author who points that out? As any member of AA will tell you, denial of the problem will make that problem worse, not better.

Yes, there is a bookstore in Morehead (two counting the university), but it's pretty small and sparsely supplied. The biggest section is for the religious right's reading pleasure. Yes, students at the university do have dictionaries. Some of them. But most of them have trouble affording textbooks and a reference book is a luxury. In college, my dorm roomate once stole a dictionary (from a professor :) and it was the only one on the floor.

If you don't think this book tells truth, you don't know it or you're afraid to admit it. Offutt's blessing to us (and probably curse to himself) is that he sees the truth dead on and can't help but pointing it out.

To a crazy person, a hero is not the one who says "you're fine, just a bit eccentrtic", but the one who forces him to recognize the truth, and pushes him to get help. No wonder so many Eastern Kentuckians are upset at Offutt. Instead of talking about the beauty (which is there in abundance!), he grinds their noses in problems that desperately need to be fixed.

The author writes about his returning to his home to his eastern Ketucky roots to teach at the local college, and "give back" to his hometown. That part of the book was informative for me since I did not know a whole lot about that part of the world and its people. But, the really intersting part of the book is the parallel story he tells about his mother and father inlaw, who are Holocaust Survivors.

That part of the book, which documents his inlaws' survival stories, is especially memorable. Now the fascinating aspect of all of this to me was that the two stories, ie his memoir, and the inlaws' history, have virtually nothing to do with each other.

The two stories remain separate throughout the book.

Offutt's style of short concise sentences, and chapters makes for easy reading. His insights into the Appalachian culture

are eye opening for us outsiders.

I recommend the book, especially for those who might be considering "going home" to give back. According to Offutt, it isn't easy.

As with each of his works of fiction, "No Heroes" is a testimony more to Mr. Offutt's ability to exploit easy targets and stereotypes generally associated with the Appalachian Mountain region, rather than explore the people and attitudes that compose its hillsides and valleys.

For someone who claims he comes home to save his people how can he so consistently get his people wrong? The isolation he speaks of fails to recognize that in the last twenty years, television, computers, digital cable, satellite dishes, and the Internet have greatly affected the landscape of the United States and created a broad-sweeping homogenization that has affected, yes, even eastern Kentucky.

Sadly many find it easy to believe that the region is full of uneducated persons with no dreams of traveling past the county line or bettering themselves in our ever-competitive capitalist society. It's easy to fall for the words of a man who believes he is the only person to make it out of those mountains and do something with his life. For a man who only sees a past that no longer exists, and which he has done nothing to change.

I'm not from Kentucky and have never visited the state, so I can't speak to any factual errors that might be in this book. I CAN say that I found it an excellent read and it brought to life scenes I can have no personal experience of, whether they transpire in the hills of KY or in the prison camps of WWII. The juxtaposition of the Holocaust tales and the homecoming to Kentucky stories is unusual, but it worked for me; I've never felt so vividly what Jews went through under the Nazis.
Looking at Chris Offutt's pictures and reading his words, I don't think I'd get along with him too well. He does seem to have a chip on his shoulder and seems haunted by some ghosts that elude his attempts to put them to rest. But he uses words well and gave me a couple of interesting hours inside his head...a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't--well, you know.

I'm from the county Offutt writes about coming home to, and if we were really as backward and hickish as he describes us I would be leaving too. No, there's not a lot of opportunity here for our kids (most of whom do graduate from high school, and a good many from college). And yes, it's pretty provincial. But if what he tells here is what he really saw then he sure wasn't paying much attention. And if he really came here to save us from what he imagines is our way of life, all discount shopping and video stores and driving around in rusted-out trucks, it's no surprise he came away disappointed.

He treats the story of his in-laws better, but the rest of this book doesn't deserve to be called "nonfiction." Too bad a lot of people who don't know better will believe it.