Word: offutt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Everything works except plot in the author's third book of short stories, which is to say, everything is believable except what happens. The stories are good anyway. Offutt knows his people--Kentucky men, drinkers, loners unsurprised at being kicked out by wives or girlfriends. He dreams in their language: "The next time I visited Tarvis, I drank the neck and shoulders out of a fifth while he talked." But Tarvis commits suicide in an elaborate, pop-novel way. Another man, a trucker, picks up a woman in a bar, is later arrested for dynamiting a dam, still later learns...
...Chris Offutt is a prize-winning short-story writer (Kentucky Straight), and in his tough, funny, sometimes brilliantly written first novel, he can't quite shake the habit. The Good Brother (Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $23) could not be simpler or more direct in its narrative plan: a good man, Virgil Caudill, caught in a crushing predicament not of his making, commits a murder that seems unavoidable, abandons his home in the Kentucky hill country and survives precariously in Montana. The pages that narrate this contain no misdirection, no writerish word tasting, not even a flashback or shift in point...
...which point the novel and hero again change character. Virgil falls among militia fanatics, whose bellicose posturing he watches without comprehension. As a Kentuckian, he understands a gun culture, but not the Westerners' devout hatred of the Federal Government. By now he is a wholly passive observer, as Offutt's narration heads off at right angles to itself, and the militia crazies prepare to end the tale in righteous fury. The author can't do for the Montana Aryans what he did for the Rocksalt garbage crew, which is to see them sympathetically, from the inside out. No one else...
...relaxed, easygoing album; the songs sail blithely along, like boats on a lake on a bright, breezy day. although his Beatles glory years may be boxed and packaged along with the anthologies, this album shows his muse is still very much with him." BOOKS . . . THE GOOD BROTHER: "Chris Offutt is a prize-winning short-story writer ('Kentucky Straight'), and in his tough, funny, sometimes brilliantly written first novel, he can't quite shake the habit," says TIME's John Skow. 'The Good Brother' (Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $23) could not be simpler or more direct in its narrative plan...
Earlier this year Davis and his wife lost their only son tragically in an auto accident, but the candidate remained in the race. A Vietnam vet, in a district that's home to Offutt Air Force Base, he campaigns with the slogan "Helping Those Who Have Helped America." But the Second is an unpredictable district--once Democratic, now Republican--and Davis has a platform that seems to straddle the ideological fence: he wants less government and supports the death penalty, but would preserve Medicare funds and student loans...