pagesofjulia

First book I’ve read in the new year and it is a big winner. I read Offutt’s No Heroes some years ago, and I have a few clear memories of it – and I gave it an 8 – but I have to say it’s faded some since then. This one, I think, will be different. From the first pages he had me nodding along in recognition and agreement, when I wasn’t laughing til my sides split. This is a remarkable book in several ways.

For one thing, as an example of craft and structure in memoir, I appreciated the format: alternate chapters switch between two timelines, one (the narrator’s present) in which his wife is pregnant (with the courtship & marriage compressed at the start), and an earlier one in which the younger man leaves his home in the eastern Kentucky hills and travels for more than a decade around the country as an itinerant, not to say bum, short-term laborer and modestly aspiring artist. In the end, this is a memoir of becoming a father. The younger Offutt’s travels, bumbles, attempts at self-destruction eventually make him the man (for better or worse) who meets Rita, marries, and enters on purpose but somewhat reluctantly into the pregnancy that defines the narrative present. When the two timelines meet at the book’s end there is, again, heavy compression, rushing us through Rita-to-pregnancy; I can sense some readers protesting at that rush, but I think it suits the scope of this book. True memoirists have at least several memoirs in them; there’s a piece of Bernard Cooper wisdom on this topic. The Same River Twice is about Offutt becoming a father within himself. It’s not so much about Rita, who in these pages is a lovely and likeable person but mostly remains off-page.

In his roamings of the country, Offutt recalls Blue Highways (maybe even On the Road) but with perhaps more angst – or at least angst that felt more familiar to my own – and definitely more laughs. I could hardly breathe at Offutt’s first couple of sexual encounters, and his adventures in the Florida swamp had me pretty riveted. This is some of the best humor writing I’ve seen in some time.

And on the other hand, in the later timeline, a more mature and serious-voiced narrator (who nonetheless self-deprecates) walks alone in the floodplain woods near his and Rita’s rental home on a dirt road on the Iowa River. This man is contemplative and highly observant of the natural world. He’s struggling with pending fatherhood; he always wanted children but felt less ready than Rita. She worried about her age, while he worried that he still lacked stable employment (he’s trying to sell his writing) and general responsible adulthood. When Rita becomes pregnant, he feels pride, relief, and happiness that she is happy; he feels terrified of the responsibility, and selfishly (he’d say) sorry to lose his freedom. He’s afraid he’ll damage his child; his father has always said he comes from a long line of bad fathers. Fear, in fact, is paramount. “I fear the loss of independence although I didn’t do so well alone.” He’s on a journey to learn about pregnancy and babies, partly through library books and an ill-fated hospital-based Lamaze class, but also via walks in the woods, where he watches the natural world cycle through life and death. Seamlessly integrated facts about biology and natural and human history add to his musings. If the earlier hapless-bum episodes are woeful and hilarious, the older man is quietly thoughtful and wise (even if he denies it). I thought there were some fascinating observations about what it means to be a parent. (I am not a parent. I did call up a few friends to discuss their experiences.)

Let me also note, I found Offutt because of my connection to writing in Appalachia. Relatively little of this book is set there: we see young Offutt leave as a teen, with two brief returns (one for recuperation from injury, one under great duress for his brother’s wedding); otherwise he is all over the country or settling in Iowa. But eastern Kentucky looms throughout; it’s what he’s escaping and it continues to define him, most obviously in the accent that other people feel marks him as a type.

Where I’m from, the foothills of southern Appalachia are humped like a kicked rug, full of steep furrows. Families live scattered among the ridges and hollows in tiny communities containing no formal elements save a post office… Our hills are the most isolated area of America, the subject of countless doctoral theses. It’s an odd sensation to read about yourself as counterpart to the aborigine or Eskimo*. If VISTA wasn’t bothering us, some clown was running around the hills with a tape recorder. Strangers told us we spoke Elizabethan English, that we were contemporary ancestors to everyone else. They told us the correct way to pronounce “Appalachia,” as if we didn’t know where we’d been living for the past three hundred years.

This is a narrator who then travels to, of all places, Manhattan, where he has to relearn how to walk to accommodate the traffic of other people doing the same thing near him. After some hours on a bench watching New Yorkers walk near each other, he concludes his stride is too long and regular for the environment; the locals use quick, short steps, like dancing. “As long as I concentrated, everything was jake, but the minute my attention wavered, my gait lengthened and someone’s legs entangled with mine.”

Offutt makes repeated references to Kentucky’s Daniel Boone and explorer-to-America Christopher Columbus, as he styles himself also an explorer and a frontiersman, but without the aggrandizement that implies. “Two hundred years back, someone asked Boone if he had ever been lost. He answered no, but that he’d once been bewildered for three days. I knew exactly how he felt.” On returning home for the brother’s wedding: “After Columbus’s third trip across the sea, he was brought home in manacles and chains. I knew how he felt.” The aspiring-writer Offutt is a funny thread: he journals compulsively, copiously, but despite defining himself as a poet for a long stretch, writes no poetry. (He also decides to be a painter and a screenwriter at different points without actually producing any art.) I loved this bit:

My adherence to the jounal slid into a strange realm where I viewed my immediate interactions as a form of living diary. If riding a bicycle through a snowstorm sounded like good material for the journal, I borrowed a bike in a blizzard. The actual ride didn’t matter. What I did was try to observe myself as carefully as possible, while simultaneously imagining myself writing everything down later.

If that doesn’t sound like a social media obsession before its time, I don’t know what does.

Offutt is a gorgeous writer of prose. The subject matter – family dynamics and stress, the natural world, travel and restlessness, the meaning of life, place and particularly Appalachia, the angst of trying to be a writer – certainly speaks to me. An entire chapter is devoted to the importance of names (a special interest of mine). But the writing is notable for its own sake. Check out this metaphor-to-simile turn: “The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a watercolor background with too much paint.” And metaphor plus anthimeria: “The riverbank is a crouching porcupine, bare tree limbs quilling the sky.” This is probably my favorite travels-in-America chronicle yet, and I’ve read a few. I’ll be thinking about this one.

*this book was published in 1993.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: Appalachia, family, memoir, nonfiction, sense of place | 2 Comments »