Home is here and everywhere else and rarely spoken of with indifference. It is a place to where some never want return. And to some it's a place they can't. To others it's that place they wished they'd never had to leave. Home's an old, out-of-style, ill-fitting, soft sweater for most - unattractive and unflattering and somehow uncomfortable and immensely comforting at once. It's the one we just can't give up to Goodwill. Just ask Chris Offutt.

In his latest book, No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (Simon & Schuster, 2002) Offutt once again takes us back home with him to the hills of eastern Kentucky. In previously published works, the short story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, and the novel The Good Brother, the hills provided not only a setting, but the reason for writing in the first place. Offutt doesn't just seem to find material in the people, the mores, the geography, the air, the light, the scent of Kentucky - he seems to be haunted by them.

I'll be straight. I'm a super-fan of the man's writing. He's just damn good. Criticize his dialogue? Forget about it. It's on. It's real without being cutely quaint, and when it's funny, it's because it doesn't seem calculated. He grants his characters the gift of respect and lets them be on the page - existing with an unmatched degree of authenticity. Think of all the ways you can express the idea of "genuine." Add one more, and you'll have a story by Chris Offutt

In No Heroes, Offutt gives life to the real-life. It's the story of his homecoming. After accepting a teaching job at his alma mater, Morehead State University, he returns not just to Kentucky, but also to both its beauty and its ugliness. And here the struggle ensues. His journey toward a reconciliation of his place within the inertia of the hills is intertwined with the story of his in-laws, Arthur and Irene, Polish survivors of the Holocaust living in New York. Offutt's spare narrative style is congruous with Arthur and Irene's straightforward personal accounts of surviving the concentration camps, and in this absence of embellishment, the poignant details of their experiences resonate.

The parallels between Offutt's and his in-law's stories are apparent, but never is the gravity and severity of Arthur and Irene's past trivialized for the comparison. As evidenced in the Appalachians, the mechanisms used to subjugate in contemporary American society are relatives, in purpose, to those used in Nazi Germany. The lack of educational, cultural, and economic opportunities is a more passive and less immediate method for extinction. But it's a killing-off nonetheless.

Offutt has a particularly keen eye for processing the complexities of a human deprived. It's this acute ability that allows him to convince us that Home (even if we can't get there physically, psychologically, or emotionally) never ceases to be.

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Michelle Brotherton


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