The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday, illus. by Al Momaday

Posted on April 13, 2018 by pagesofjulia

I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth.

A short book, recommended to me by Kim Dana Kupperman as a way of considering an oral tradition. N. Scott Momaday is a Kiowa Indian, born in Oklahoma but raised on reservations in the southwest. He travels home to Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma to visit his grandmother’s grave, and this book reflects his journey as well as the original one the Kiowas made, from Yellowstone through the Black Hills, and south to the Wichita Mountains. This book is a record of the legends, the orally passed-down traditional narrative of a tribe and a culture now passed on. It is told in three voices. The first is the ancestral voice of the oral tradition (“the voice of my father,” Al Momaday, who also illustrates the book); the second, a historical commentary; and the third, Momaday’s own voice “of personal reminiscence.” Each short section separates these voices from each other visually:

It is a spare, slim book, under 100 pages and with lots of white space as in the spread above, and with illustrations to space things out further. It is therefore just a sketching (no pun intended) of a history, and somehow this feels right, since as Momaday points out, “the golden age of the Kiowas had been short-lived, ninety or a hundred years, say, from about 1740. The culture would persist for a while in decline, until about 1875, but then it would be gone…” His ability to piece these stories together is a rare one, and the record is necessarily scanty. But the scraps that we do have here are wise and hold a certain dignity.

They also hold a sense of place. I loved lines like, “Houses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the weather watch.” It somehow makes sense to me that Momaday would have so much to say about a place he feels tied to without actually inhabiting; that it’s an ancestral belonging.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

In terms of the oral tradition, I noticed that the storytelling style in those parts was simple, and often involved shifts that we are unaccustomed to in the written stories; but when read aloud, they sound more like the way we still tell stories today. “Bad women are thrown away. Once there was a handsome young man…”

Simply told, easy to read, but thoughtful and thought-provoking, and a way into stories that we don’t have much access to. As Momaday writes himself in the preface to this edition, twenty-five years after the first: “One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness.”

Rating: 7 black-eared horses.

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Son of a Gun by Justin St. Germain

Posted on April 11, 2018 by pagesofjulia

Justin St. Germain’s Son of a Gun is a compelling, heart-breaking piece of personal narrative, and it is told beautifully, with restraint and with artistry and structure. The first observation is one any reader might make; the second is the more subtle observation of a reader looking for writing tricks. This is a book that works beautifully on both levels.

The narrator was raised by a complicated woman named Debbie. She was a soldier, a strong woman who made impulsive decisions and charged ahead, took care of herself and her two sons through all kinds of hardship; she had poor judgment in choosing romantic partners, was married five times with many relationships in between, for which she was harshly judged in turn. When Justin was 20, she was murdered by her most recent husband, Ray, a former cop with the requisite mustache and mirrored sunglasses. Until then, Justin had thought Ray the most harmless one of the bunch.

This memoir is the story of Justin’s mother’s death: his shock and grief, his anger, the violent end of Debbie and, later, of Ray. It ranges between these individual instances of gun violence and others, personal and societal, as Justin visits with Debbie’s former partners, goes shopping at a gun show, and cycles back over and over again to Tombstone. Oh, did I leave that part out? Justin and his brother Josh were raised in Tombstone, Arizona, a town whose very existence depends on the legends of Wild West shoot-outs.

I appreciate St. Germain’s title, because it reinvents an old and meaningless saying in a fresh new way: making the point that he is indeed a son of a gun, of a gun culture that engineered his mother’s demise. I also appreciate the way he handled his own character, the narrator, in a spare way that acknowledges (for example) the problematic way in which the 20-year-old reacts to his mother’s murder. He does not always behave well, but who would?

It’s a hell of a sad story, one that recalls my recent read Love and Death in the Sunshine State by Cutter Wood (review to come), and A Woman on the Edge of Time. It’s a hell of a story, in the first place, and at the same time, tragically, nothing out of the ordinary: a 2017 CDC report concluded that nearly half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former intimate partner. St. Germain does deal with this larger context, although his primary concern (understandably) remains personal.

A hell of a story, but also artfully told. I often think that creative writing, the kind I’m studying, has two parts: an interesting story, and the artful telling of it. A book can become successful, can please or entertain and sell, with either one or the other of those elements, but the best books have both a good story and a good telling. One of the key features of this book, I think, is the narrative restraint. Anytime a writer handles a story this close to home and this fraught–emotional, violent, graphic–it’s difficult to keep a calm perspective, and yet not be cold and distant. St. Germain walks that line. Another strength is the weaving in of the external, if you will, theme material: the history of Wyatt Earp and the shootout at the O.K. Corral (which St. Germain informs us actually took place “in a vacant lot to the north, between a back alley and what is now the highway. But try putting that on a T-shirt”). This is a classic gift to the writer from the universe: that he was brought up in Tombstone, that Tombstone and Wyatt Earp and the O.K. offer such a backdrop for his story and his reflections on it. This braided-in information is almost too perfect for his story; but this is why we say fact is stranger than fiction. It allows a very neat context for the narrator to think about not only his personal tragedy, but the larger cultural implications.

I was riveted as I read this book, all the way through in a day, because this story has momentum, suspense and crafted pacing. I was heartbroken for the characters, and struck by St. Germain’s gestures at the larger world. It’s a very fine book.

Rating: 8 arcane alphanumerics.

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Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

Posted on April 6, 2018 by pagesofjulia

Strong words, but I’m going to say it: I think this is the most enjoyable craft book I have read. Strunk & White and Stephen King are very good but McPhee wins it.

Eight essays about writing, previously published in The New Yorker and only one of them previously collected (“but to a far greater extent [it] belongs here”). McPhee is funny, self-deprecating, practical, and wise. He tells stories! I love the anecdotes, such as the one that begins “Frame of Reference,” and makes the point that a reference must always be chosen with an audience in mind. (Greta Garbo will not be meaningful to kids born after 2000; Britney Spears will not be meaningful to my grandmother.) He gives good, down-to-earth writing advice, unsurprising, as this skill has been honed by decades of teaching experience. McPhee’s students populate these essays, too, some of them bumbling and some of them accomplished, and all of them treated gently. He relates tales of interviews that went easily (Woody Allen) and less easily (Jackie Gleason). The tone, McPhee’s writing voice, is exceptionable. I find him just quintessentially likeable. He is funny, humble, and instantly recognizable.

“Progression” is about linkages, and fits nicely with the following essay, “Structure,” on that topic. “Editors & Publisher” is something of a series of profiles of those McPhee has worked with, with some advice and wisdom about how the work works. “Elicitation” is about interviews (those great stories), both anecdote and how-to. “Frame of Reference,” with all its details from life and history and McPhee’s writing and reading, was one of the most enjoyable essays for me. “Checkpoints” is about fact-checkers, again with such an engaging proportion of fascinating story and practicality. “Draft No. 4” is about the writing process and the writing life: how drafting works, and how to hopefully retain sanity. “Omission” is about brevity, and cutting, and allows McPhee to finish both this essay and the book with a humorous line spoken by General Eisenhower: this is a writer who knows how to pick a quotation and let it stand.

McPhee gave me some things to ponder: his astonishing method of finding a structure first and them a subject to fit it; his method of note-taking and outlining; his drafting. And I will cherish forever one-liners like, “If you kill a widow, you pick up a whole line” (not about homicide at all, but about “greening,” a topic after my own heart). I will keep this book handy for both its solid advice and its entertainment value. I’ll be recommending it to everyone I know; and I can’t wait to read more McPhee.

Rating: 9 mustaches.

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Tangerine by Christine Mangan

Posted on April 4, 2018 by pagesofjulia

Former college roommates reunite in Morocco, with enigmatic tensions and references to a troubled past.

Christine Mangan’s first novel, Tangerine, offers suspense and lingering questions in a drama centered on the post-college relationship between two young women recently relocated to Morocco.

Lucy Mason and Alice Shipley were roommates at Bennington College in Vermont. They came from quite different circumstances: Alice was a well-off British orphan, whose guardian Aunt Maude is serious but somewhat unfeeling in her role. Lucy was a scholarship student, also an orphan, and this similarity is part of what led the pair to bond. They were terribly close in college–until the accident.

In Tangerine‘s opening pages, Alice has moved to Tangier with her new husband, John. He loves the city, its cacophony of sights and smells, its colorful crowds, jazz clubs and ubiquitous hot mint tea. Alice is not so sure. She hasn’t left their apartment in weeks, maybe months, when Lucy turns up on the stoop. By contrast, a local tells Lucy almost immediately upon her arrival: “You are a Tangierine now,” pronounced like the fruit, and highlighting the rich, fragrant foreignness of the backdrop to this drama.

In alternating chapters, the reader encounters past and present through Lucy’s and Alice’s respective perspectives. An epilogue and prologue, with unnamed narrators, offer more mystery. John is a shifting but mostly unsympathetic character. The two women’s accounts of past events differ only slightly, at first. But as the novel unfolds, it becomes complicated. Lucy’s devotion is perhaps a bit too intense. Alice’s agoraphobia is variously attributed to her parents’ death, or to a more sinister cause. Eventually, their memories of their shared past diverge enough that the question can no longer be ignored. Is this gaslighting? Mental illness? Surreality? Are these the simple mistakes of memory or is there a more ominous force at work?

In an atmosphere of shimmering heat, multiple languages and layers of history and mythology, two young women are bound together–although the reader must wait to find out if it is by a trick of fate or someone’s purposeful actions. While there is money at issue–Alice’s trust fund–the real risks are more significant. As this expertly paced novel rushes toward its finale, the question of whose reality is to be trusted becomes a question of sanity, or even of life and death.

Tangerine is a novel of intrigue and shifting perspectives, starring two ultimately unreliable narrators. Its appeal lies in the lush, sensual setting; the metered release of information about the shadowy past; and especially in untangling the twisted mystery of the present. Suspense fans will be well satisfied.

This review originally ran in the March 8, 2018 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 scalding hot glasses of mint tea.

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San Diego’s Old Globe presents Uncle Vanya

Posted on March 30, 2018 by pagesofjulia

I previewed this one for you a few weeks ago.

Uncle Vanya started slow but ended up enjoyable. The first half, pre-intermission, dragged a little; Grammy felt so, and I did, and I heard similar murmurings about us. I suspect the conversational model for this production (see that earlier post) contributed to this impression, as it indeed took more audience effort to engage with the actors and their lines. And here’s a major flaw in the model: we had read quite a bit about the quietness and the recommendation to use the offered assistive listening devices. We were greeted upon arrival with further cautions on this point. But then we were told that the device was incompatible with hearing aids. Grammy was told that she could take her hearing aids out to use the device, but that her hearing aids should be sufficient. Well, they weren’t. She pretty much missed the first half of the production. We set her up during intermission, and she caught the second half fine, but we did some pretty serious debriefing after the show about what she’d missed, so that she really got the overall story only after the fact. I’m very disappointed in this aspect. It’s a shame that after such effort was taken, we were so poorly served. An innovative production can only be appreciated to the extent that it can be taken in.

That said, the second half picked up in pace (and I found it much funnier), and Grammy could hear, and I observed that the crowd around me perked up. It’s really a fine play by Chekhov, only it requires a little patience. The acting was fine! And the theatre is a lovely space: small and intimate and atmospheric. There is something so special about a theatre in the round. (I spent the first half watching an elderly gentleman in the front row across from me sleeping. He woke up but good in the second half.)

In a classic sense, the plot of the play involves several formations of unrequited love; the resentments of family, class, income, and caregiving roles; and general frustrations about the shape of human lives: family, and our relationship with the natural world. There is a fair amount of humor, but the chief feeling is one of distress. Also classic is the sense that if only these people would talk to each other outright, much would be resolved; but if this is an exasperating tendency of fiction plots, that’s only because it’s an exasperating tendency of people in real life. In the end, I felt sympathy for most of the characters, despite their flaws. I thought the acting was wonderful, especially Vanya, and the doctor, and Sonya, and I thought the production over all was a good one–setting, props, theatre management–and I, at least, had no trouble hearing. But again, the failure to serve my Grammy with the much-discussed assistive listening devices is a crying shame. I enjoyed it, but certainly have some criticisms. As always, I feel very lucky to take in fine theatre in a beautiful city and with great company. Thanks, Grammy.

Rating: 7 glasses of vodka, naturally.

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Quick list of LGBTQ reads

Posted on March 28, 2018 by pagesofjulia

A graduate of my MFA program asked on a private forum,

Does anyone have suggestions of short stories, essays, and poems I could use in a Gender and Lit class that could introduce my students to LGBTQ lit and how it resists stereotypes and challenges the gender binary?

and I wanted to put together a quick list in response. But first, let me say: I think it’s interesting to consider who is qualified to answer this question. Part of me feels the need to disclose that I’m not a member of the LGBTQ community in the sense that I’m straight and cis-gendered. My colleagues & classmates who are members of this community by identity might have more authority in answering this request than I have. On the other hand, I hope that we can all recognize the reading that a) appears well-crafted and b) answers a certain need. I’m an LGBTQ ally. I try to recognize the nuances of (for example) stereotypes, as posed by the person who posted this request. I’m not perfect, but I’ve made an effort to be an informed reader of this and many other kinds of literature. Best efforts, then, with a stated sensitivity to the privilege with which I enter this work.

Here are the top nine books that I thought of. The original poster asked for shorter works, so my response is imperfect, but these are what I have to offer. (Two collections offer easy excerpting; more effort would be required to excerpt the longer full works, but it might be worth it.)

book list:

Others responded to this request with titles like Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a collection from Appalachia, and with some connections to my MFA program, edited by Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray–I own this book but haven’t cracked it yet, I’m afraid–and Andrea Gibson’s poem “Your Life.” Further:

Danez Smith and Qwo-Li Driskill and Ocean Vuong are poets that intermingled their race and their lgbt identity in their poems. Janet Mock. I mean technically a lot of the Harlem renaissance poets were always merging their otherness with their racial identity and their sexual identity. Such as Langston Hughes. Audrey Lorde’s Zami actually creates this almost mythos surrounding blackness and coming into this womanly identity and loving women. Leslie Feinburg is a bit heavy but ze is a prominent figure in the lgbt community. Allison Bechdel is a graphic novelist but graphic novels are still solid and easy to pick up on as a narrative.

Music is fun too! Rappers reclaim particular words and terms… Again still a bit heavy but Brockhampton and The Internet are fun and sometimes soft lyrical gay sounds. Where Mykki Blanco is… all weird trance-y edm bopping type sounds that scopes in on… the black lgbt club scene and their lingo and it’s just fun. I dunno if those are also lyrical structures to be explored. I think they are important but that’s just… how I perceive music as a social device. Especially in the black community.

And I just want to say, especially in response to that last post, that I think interdisciplinarity is a really important strategy in education. I think I would have been more engaged in high school if I’d better understood the ways in which science, art, literature, history, social movements, etc. happened in tandem, rather than in separate classrooms. Maybe it’s my interest in humans, but I think understanding that all these “subjects” are a part of human history and human experience, would have made each more interesting to me than they were at the time. Figuring out the interconnectedness on my own, later, was itself a fascinating process, but I might have been more excited about school at the time if interdiscplinarity had been made a bit more clear to me then. So, I support the inclusion of music in this class!

Well, that was a longer post than I intended; I hope it was helpful (to the original asker, or to anyone), and I’m very interested in what others may have to offer as well. Comment below!

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Object Lessons by Eavan Boland

Posted on March 23, 2018 by pagesofjulia

I recall studying a poem in high school by Eavan Boland titled “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me.” As I approached this semester’s critical essay, one of the talented faculty in my program, Diane Gilliam, recommended this work of prose, for my topic on objects. Diane’s words, to the best of my memory, were, “Every woman artist needs to read this book.” I’m so glad I did; especially when I got to page 231, where “The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me” makes an appearance, as the only poem of her own that Boland chooses to feature. Synchronicity.

Object Lessons is an examination of the conflict Boland has experienced between her self as poet and her self as woman, with the overlay of Irishness on it all. She leaves Ireland at age five, to a London that largely rejects her kind, to return to her home country in her teens and to study poetry at Trinity in Dublin, a charged literary atmosphere. It takes some time for this young person, still discovering herself as a woman, a sexual creature, and a person of a nation, not to mention as a poet, to see the holes in the legacy she has inherited: there is no place for her in this history. “It was not exactly or even chiefly that the recurrences of my world–a child’s face, the dial of a washing machine–were absent from the tradition [of the poet’s life], although they were. It was not even so much that I was a woman. It was that being a woman, I had entered into a life for which poetry has no name.” Names are important. “Every art is inscribed with them. Every life depends on them.” Further, about the poet-versus-woman tension: “For anyone who is drawn into either of these lives, the pressure is there to betray the other: to disown or simplify, to resolve an inherent tension by making a false design from the ethical capabilities of one life or the visionary possibilities of the other.”

Over the course of this book, she lays out the problems she found and her own best efforts at solving them, a job she acknowledges is unfinished. But she hopes that a book like this helps future women poets, by giving them a starting point, something else to point to. Heartbreakingly, by contrast, she relates that the first woman poet she knew of as a young woman was Sylvia Plath, and that name she knew first as a suicide, not a poet at all.

I was also very interested in the way this memoir started: with the missing, imagined, scantily sketched biography of her grandmother. The narrator explores the history, the meager records of the woman; she imagines; and she travels to view a grave and a hospital. It’s a lovely study, the story of someone absent, and a consideration of what we get from an ancestor we can’t really know.

Boland has plenty of good thoughts about place, sense of place, and nation as aspect of our selves and our writing selves. She makes much of the Irish poetic tradition to conflate the feminine and the national. Her musings can get pretty cerebral and abstract, so this memoir took some slow, thoughtful reading; but I think it’s worth the time. Also, I am very interested in Boland’s assertion that she structured the book like a poem: “in turnings and returnings.” I have more thinking to do.

Rating: 7 high heels tipped with steel.

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Breathe (2017)

Posted on March 21, 2018 by pagesofjulia

Breathe is a lovely movie. If not the finest accomplishment of the art form, it was a very enjoyable, positive, uplifting story; and if that sounds sentimental, then guilty as charged, what do you want from me, I’m human. I appreciated knowing that it was a true story because I loved the background (nodding to the necessity for ADA legislation, for instance) of looking for hints of today in this version of yesterday. Disability rights matter to me. In the selfish way that our own experiences shape our concerns in the world, I have a bad knee; I had knee surgery some years ago and needed special accommodations a time or two, and my frustrations in meeting even my simple, and temporary, needs gave me a greater appreciation for the much bigger concerns of more profoundly and permanently challenged people.

This is a rather sentimental story, with a love story forming at least part of its heart. Robin and Diana meet and fall in love, and they marry around the time that he falls ill with a fever that ends in his total paralysis by polio: “you can’t even breathe for yourself.” He becomes depressed in the hospital (and who can blame him?!) but she won’t “let” him die, insists that he pursue his life anyway, and they have to break him out of the hospital against the wishes of its administration, in an era when polio patients were apparently, according to this film, basically imprisoned. What follows is a family of friends making their own way: building him a wheelchair that incorporates his breathing apparatus, dealing with the obvious calamity of the breathing apparatus failing, and gradually freeing him to travel the world. They attend a disability conference in Germany where they have to literally break the doorway out of a hotel room to fit his chair in (this is where I see promises of ADA). He lives a longer and fuller life than anyone thought possible, frees some of his co-polio-sufferers from the hospital/prison system, and dies at home with his family with him–in an assisted suicide, by the way, thereby touching on another medical-ethics hot button.

This film absolutely deals in emotions, and gets a wee bit saccharine; but it felt really good, I learned some things, and it was, well, sweet. I had a perfectly nice time watching this movie and I cried at the end and then felt better again. There are worse ways to spend an evening.

Rating: objectively, 7, but I give 8 dusty Spanish roads for emotional impact.

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Let’s No One Get Hurt by Jon Pineda

Posted on March 16, 2018 by pagesofjulia

A teenaged squatter with a poet’s heart and a stolen fly-fishing rod struggles to map her own way.

“I know I’m not a woman yet. But I’m also not a girl. I’m a poem no one will ever translate.” With Let’s No One Get Hurt, Jon Pineda (Apology) offers a wild, yearning, strong-willed protagonist and a novel with both tenderness and violence at its core.

“In a few months, I’ll be sixteen, but my body doesn’t know it.” Pearl’s father says she’s 15 going on 50. She lives in an abandoned boathouse with her father and two other adult men. Dox and Fritter are father and son, and Dox remembers Pearl’s mother, from before. Now, they form a family of sorts, subsisting on catfish and crayfish from the river, mushrooms and wild rice from the woods and building scraps from the wealthy subdivision nearby.

Pearl has made new acquaintances: the upper-class boys who live in the development surrounding the golf course near her makeshift home. They drive tricked-out golf carts and shoot their daddies’ fancy shotguns for fun, filming it all for the Internet where they hope to go viral. One of them takes a special interest in her, playing his father’s wealth against her household’s tenuous living. Pearl’s coming-of-age and her troubled liaison with these boys define the novel’s timeline. As she grows up, her old dog, Marianne Moore, prepares to die. (If her father had his way, Pearl would do the right thing and shoot her already.) A former poetry professor who named the dog after one of his favorite subjects, her father also suffers from increasingly poor health. Fritter paints a never-ending mural of pitch black and Dox noodles on his cigar-box guitar.

Pearl’s mother was a scholar who said that “poems were never finished, that they were only abandoned.” Pearl likes to think that maybe all abandoned things are poems. She lives in an abandoned place; maybe she lives inside a poem. As a narrative voice, she fights the urge to see poetry in images and to describe her world lyrically: “I hate that I even see them as wings. They’re just napkins.”

Let’s No One Get Hurt is about race (most pointedly when Pearl unintentionally crashes a Civil War reenactment with Fritter, a dreadlocked, 300-pound black man) as well as class. It is about families and how they hurt and help one another, the mysteries of Pearl’s mother and of the rich boys’ everyday cruelties. “The river waits for me, and that’s all that matters.” As a river-based adventure of difficult adolescence, Let’s No One Get Hurt inevitably recalls Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as Bonnie Jo Campbell’s female-centered Once Upon a River. Pineda’s writing is thick with the lush warmth of the American South and the harshness of a life scavenged out-of-doors, and his teenaged girl’s perspective is spot-on. This novel of exploration, exploitation and the poetry in it all will stun readers of all kinds, especially those who appreciate strong characters and tough choices.

This review originally ran in the March 1, 2018 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 blue cats.

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No Heroes by Chris Offutt

Posted on March 14, 2018 by pagesofjulia

No matter how you leave the hills–the army, prison, marriage, a job–when you move back after twenty years, the whole county is carefully watching. They want to see the changes that the outside world put on you. They are curious to know if you’ve lost your laughter. They are worried that perhaps you’ve gotten above your raisings.

This is beginning of No Heroes. Only the prologue retains this second-person perspective, which I think would have gotten difficult for the length of the book, but it’s a perfect intro: it brings immediacy, in that you are the one facing these challenges; and it offers a dreamy, literary take on Chris Offutt’s rough-edged subject and setting. This prologue takes the form of an instruction manual (“to do this, do this”): how to return home, if home is this specific place. It concludes:

You are no longer from somewhere. Here is where you are. This is home. This dirt is yours.

It’s a perfect beginning.

This book is a close cousin to Jeremy Jones’s Bearwallow, which comes as no surprise because Jeremy recommended it to me.

It’s a fine book. In blurbs on the back, Offutt’s style is compared to that of Hemingway and Raymond Carver: strong words, but I can see the comparison. Offutt tends toward short, declarative sentences, except when he doesn’t (like Hemingway, a man perfectly comfortable with long, convoluted sentences and full-blooming metaphor when he feels like it, despite a reputation to the contrary). That is, the prose is mostly simply put together, undemonstrative, but he also knows how to turn a surprising or beautiful phrase at the moment we least expect it; the rarity of such lines adds to their impact.

Offutt’s story, like Jones’s, is of going away and coming back. Both men are from Appalachia. Offutt is from the hills of northeast Kentucky, where he went to elementary school, high school and college within ten miles, and only realized later how unusual this was. As a troubled twenty-year-old, he’d left the hills. He returns as a forty-year-old, having collected an education, written books, married and had two boys, lived and experienced lots of places. He’s back to teach at his alma mater, a humble school where he had worked maintenance while a student, a paradoxical foot-in-two-worlds experience that his cohorts on both ends–work and school–had struggled to accept. “It was more of a high school with ashtrays than a genuine college,” Offutt writes, but that criticism sounds less nuanced in isolation than it does on the page, in the midst of his obviously tortured love for this place.

In the course of No Heroes, he navigates his return to this place, whose dirt and leaves and birds he passionately loves. His parents still live here, but his love for them is less easy. His wife, Rita, and their two sons have some trouble adjusting to a place that is not theirs. Offutt came home hoping to be a hero to students like the one he was: talented but without role models, ready to slip into crime more easily than into art. The title foreshadows the end of that plot line, of course.

But there is another plot line! And it’s a doozy, complicating the story of the homesick Appalachian who has made good and therefore alienated himself. Offutt’s in-laws are finally ready to let him tell their stories. Both are Polish Jews and survivors of a string of Hitler’s concentration camps. You think you’re homesick? The narratives of Arthur and Irene humble us all. The flashback parts are different from the whole of the book: Arthur and Irene’s chapters are told in their own voices (Offutt recorded their interviews), and his own chapters told in his own voice; occasional scenes give dialog representing the interviews themselves. While a bit jarring at times (watch those chapter titles and they will guide you; I have trouble focusing on titles, for no good reason), even this effect–the jarring in and out of a painful past–suits the subject matter. It is Arthur’s admonishment about telling the complicated story, that even victims have flaws, that titles the book: “Remember, Sonny, no heroes.”

I really enjoyed this book. It’s very rooted in a beloved place, and contains two stories equally well-told. For parents, for Appalachians, for anyone facing the tension of succeeding out of the bounds of their upbringing, for the homesick, this is an engaging memoir.

Rating: 8 “crimson maple leaves with green veins that pulsed in mourning for the branch they’d left.”

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