Amazon.com Review
Out of the Woods starts with one man leaving his Kentucky hollow and ends with another who realizes he can't return. In between, Chris Offutt's broke, lonely, or just plain down-on-their-luck characters find out exactly how difficult it is to go home again, and how equally difficult it is to stop wishing they could. The critically acclaimed author of
The Good Brother (a novel), as well as a memoir and a previous collection of stories, Offutt writes with rare honesty, insight, and restraint. "Sometimes I don't think I've done anything to leave my mark in this world. I'm the kind of person the world leaves a mark on," admits the narrator of "Two-Eleven All Around." The same might be said of all Offutt's Appalachian transplants, from the small-town sheriff of "Melungeons," forever marked by the violence and beauty of his mountain upbringing, to the rootless ex-con of "Moscow, Idaho," who wonders "if he'd ever find a woman, a job he liked, or a town he wanted to stay in." These lives are rendered in prose stripped so bare it reads like poetry--and yet is not without its own flinty wit. Given his first glimpse of his brother-in-law's corpse, the protagonist of the title story allows as how "he didn't look dead, but Gerald didn't think he looked too good either. He looked like a man with a bad hangover that he might shake by dinner." These are characters who get inside your head and stories worth reading again and again. As spare and simple as a Shaker chair, Offutt's tales should prove every bit as enduring.
--Mary Park
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Missing Kentucky, even when one lives there, is the emotional linchpin of the nine spare and stunning stories in this second collection by Offutt (Kentucky Straight; The Good Brother). Many of the entries previously appeared in magazines such as Esquire and Granta; "Melungeons" has been included in Best American Short Stories 1994. All deal with the magnetic pull of the Kentucky hills on those born there, and while a common theme enriches the cyclical nature of the collection, its repetitiveness sometimes makes one wish for a change of focus. Some narratives are straightforward: in "Darla," the eponymous protagonist returns to the hills after 30 years in Ohio, realizing that's where she belongs only after a real estate agent presses her to sell out. Other tales are more intricate. A Kentucky trucker washes up in an Oregon flood in "High Water Everywhere," then decides to go back to the hills after encountering a deputy sheriff who has resisted the impulse to leave his native turf because he knows everybody's intimate lives, and "the knowing keeps me here." "Two-Eleven All Around" plumbs a well of dark humor when the divorced narrator discovers "you raise someone else's [kids] while a stranger takes care of yours." From the protagonist of "Out of the Woods," who's never left his Kentucky county before, to the narrator of "Tough People," who learns in Montana that he's ruined for going back, the stories all resonate with isolation and lawlessness born in the Kentucky hills. These stories deserve to be parceled out, savored separately. Agent, Brandt & Brandt. (Jan.) FYI: Offutt has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
