The Same River Twice
by Chris Offutt
Bill:
Hi everybody, and welcome to the bookclub@ket. Our December
selection is Chris Offutt's The Same River Twice, and here to help me
talk about that book with you is Cait ...
Caitl:
Hi, Bill.
Bill:
... and Tona ...
Tona:
Hi.
Bill:
Welcome. Jonathan ...
Jonathan:
Hi, Bill.
Bill:
... and Dava.
Dava:
Hello.
Bill:
The book jacket really gives us a good description and a way to
begin to talk about this.The publishers write at the
age of 19 Chris Offutt had already been rejected by the Army, the Peace
Corps, the Park Rangers and the police so he left his home in the
Kentucky Appalachians and thumbed his way north into a series of odd
jobs and strange encounters with some odd people. I think I threw in
the the odd people. We will talk about that today. He ends up in Iowa
beside the Iowa River with a pregnant wife and looking forward to
fatherhood but in between a lot goes on. It is sort of written in a
couple of different ways Jonathan it's a new way we haven't read anything
this year that sort of describes a road story as well as what is
actually happening in his life when he puts together this memoir. What
about that?
Jonathan:
Yeah, it is in fact a book that seems to be composed of
two parts and it almost judging by the way it is written the style
and the subject it seems to me that it almost has been written in two
different ways and two different times of his life perhaps. One story is really as you said he drops out of high school, he starts
traveling, he goes to New York, Minnesota, Boston, Florida, he gets odd
jobs. He has a lot of parties, he makes friends with people and so on
and that is kind of a memory of his bachelor days and then
the second part is I think much more interesting and
insightful and thoughtful -- the part where he is thinking about his
life with his wife and he is thinking about what it will like to be a father. I wonder whether he has done it or his editor has told him to do it. They sort of interweave
the two together so that you get one chapter from his bachelor days and
then one chapter from his married days and so alternates throughout the
book, and I think that was probably a good idea.
Bill:
It's a different way. I don't think as I said we haven't
read anything this year. I don't know if if anybody else remembers
reading a memoir that sort of puts one chapter on the road and one
chapter sort of truisms and talking about nature and and looking
forward to those things. Dava, how did you like that. Did you like
that technique?
Dava:
I really did because I thought it was most interesting in that
was one chapter would describe his days as a rogue or whatever whatever
you want to call it. And then another chapter the very next one would
talk about his anticipation of being a father. One would look at
that and think there is such a contrast. But I really thought
that his same state of mind was reflected in both both sets of
stories. I just think it's fascinating to watch how he
evolved into this person who is yet to be a father but he still had so
many of the same fears he had while on the road. And I thought
that was what was interesting about it.
Bill:
So there was some growing up.
Dava:
It was just a carry over.
Bill:
Some maturity along the way from each story. What do
you think Tona?
Tona:
Oh I really enjoyed it. I thought that for one thing if
he had kept on with all these travels and these stories there are so
almost fantastical.
Bill:
Hmm
Tona:
You know it's hard to believe that he met all
these as you said odd and interesting people. But this sort of grounded
it I thought more in in ordinary life and then I found it very
interesting -- all his talk about his fears about being a father and all of
his imaginings about that.
Bill:
Which stories did you like the best. Did you like the road stories, the journeys, or did you like when he was back beside
the river and Rita and Chris were looking forward to the
birth of their first child. I mean I think those are really different
although Dava you said that that thread sort of ties the two
together.
Dava:
What I noticed was while he was hitchhiking across
America, he would say every time he got a job promotion he would have to
leave because that would be some kind of formality, some sort of
grounding, or anytime a woman seemed to get too close he would want to
leave and then he even talks about the beginning of this book when he and Rita were considering having a child that Rita wanted a
child but he didn't. He thought about leaving her so she could
have enough time to find another man and have a child. He has the
same fears that he was finally getting over them I think with his son
coming.
Caitl:
I guess I just couldn't decide whether it was trying to be a
memoir or a more anecdotal kind of on the road
types.
Bill:
Uh .
Caitl:
Narrative. Or whether it was really just a tribute to his wife.
Which I did think he was really strongly.
Bill:
h .
Caitl:
Paying tribute to her and to the birth of their child.
Bill:
What do we know as the reader about Rita? His
wife.
Caitl:
Well, you don't know a lot about her.
The word I think comes to mind is pillar I
think. (laughs) Because she seems so stable and a contrast to his to his wildness. And and I guess toward the end of it I started to wonder exactly what it was that
brought him down finally. But you know because she was so strong and
determined and seemed to have such a clear idea of what she wanted to
do.
Tona:
You almost wonder because he reveals so much about
his mother and father -- particularly his father.
Caitl:
Oh really I don't think he did.
Tona:
Well, I think it's almost an indictment of his father.
Caitl:
h .
Tona:
And you just wonder if maybe Rita said I don't want to be
revealed and so she was this person who played a role but you
really don''t get much.
Bill:
A real true picture of her.
Caitl:
Well I guess.
Tona:
I don't think so.
Bill:
Sort of background.
Caitl:
You know you are sort of drawn into this voyeuristic mode.
ust by the nature of the book, but and but I didn't
think that he really provided much insight into his own his background.
His own family life really.
Jonathan:
The one thing he did say was that his
parents didn't want to have any connection with their relatives.
Caitl:
h .
Jonathan:
So they withdrew into the woods of Eastern Kentucky and tried
to break off contact with the rest of the family.
Dava:
Oh really.
Jonathan:
And he said more or less successfully, so we didn't really
know our relatives very much. And one thing I feel about the book is
he really doesn't describe anybody very well except himself.
Caitl:
Right.
Jonathan:
You can say his father or his mother his wife these are
important people to him but you don't really get a very good picture of
them.
Caitl:
I wanted to know more.
Jonathan:
His wife he says she has big eyes. And there is very little
else I know about her. The mother and father, you don't know much about them at all.
Caitl:
I like that he doesn't romanticize their relationship though. I
mean I thought that was a good element to it. He describe them
as a pair of mammals trying to I have forgotten the line.
Bill:
But if we don't know much about her or the parents
maybe we do know more about the people that he met on the
road. Don't you think that you got to know some of the characters some
of the oddballs if you will, some of the strange people better than you
really knew his parents. Of course, he didn't write a
lot about his time when they went back to Eastern Kentucky
and I think they only did that one time.
Bill:
Can somebody recall if you have a favorite vagabond that he met along the way.
Dava:
Well my favorites are when he worked in the Everglades. He was a
naturalist.
Bill:
With no credentials.
Dava:
Right. And he just got the job over the phone and said
he was a naturalist and came down on the bus and it was the
pathetic little tourist attraction.It was awful and the people there -- a lot of them are escapees from the law and just colorful people. You can't get to describe all of them because
it doesn't really do justice to them.
Caitl:
That was his low point I think.
Dava:
Yeah.
Tona:
But you know it seemed to me he was a rootless
person and the way he related to his family in Eastern Kentucky was it
was not rooted in the sense that I feel about that. And so
that he just traveled vaguely across America.
Tona:
That's just one of his sentences and I think how you know you
feel like he's a person that just sort of stayed on the surface and
never wanted to attach himself or have any kind of long term
relationship with anybody.
Dava:
h .
Tona:
Including his family.
Jonathan:
Well do you think then the people that he met on the road
although some of them are vividly described some of them are rather
colorful characters they are not very profound characterizations because
he didn't get to know them very well then.
Tona:
Well, it I it seems to me like that he's a very unusual odd
person. And he kind of was attracted to other people like that. They
were not exactly like him but equally odd.
Dava:
Sort of misfits.
Bill:
So there is much more than just saying that this is written
about coming of age. That he started when he dropped out of school and
started at what 18 or 19 he made these travels, he settled down, there
is so much more in that it's not just a simple tale of a
road story that maybe you were thinking of and and talking about a few
minutes ago. There's a lot more. Let me just ask you this
and we'll leave this. but the vehicle of using these two sort of
separate threads that are interwoven, did that work? I think Dava
that you said it did.
Dava:
Yeah.
Bill:
On the road in one chapter and then back by the river what
about you Cait is that something that helped you along, were you
ready for him to stop one cataclysmic sort of problem that he ran
into? Of course, he was always out of money and looking for a place toto live in. It just seems like it was one catastrophe
after another.
Caitl:
I don't know if it worked for me particularly well.
Well for one thing, I guess at the end I was just puzzled
(laughs) by the whole outcome of it and how it all was tied together so
neatly -- so no. (laughs)
Bill:
Yeah, you are saying no that's right. You know there was a
certain sort of raw edge to it all -- a roughness in some of
the dialog and some of the characters. Did you feel at all any tenseness
or any of that raw edge as you were reading it Dava?
Dava:
I thought that was what was so exciting.
Bill:
h .
Dava:
These are people I'm never going to meet. I mean.
Bill:
Well.
Dava:
Well not in such not as as in every single day. I mean every
place he went he sought the lowest, lowest level.
Bill:
h .
Dava:
And he loved it and I loved hearing about it. That's what made
it interesting to me because you know he was a person that didn't
want the strings attached to living a dream and I noticed his dreams
just shifted with every wind. He was going to be a poet, well he was going to
be an artist paint things, he couldn't stand the confinement of
working toward one single goal.
Caitl:
I didn't get the sense that he loved it. I got the sense that he
just didn't know anything else to do. That it was out of necessity
rather than.
Jonathan:
Well, I feel about the travel sections that really they
weren't as well written as the other sections.
Caitl:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
And I think that, therefore, I didn't enjoy them as much as I
might have if he had taken more time to think more carefully about what
he wanted to say in them and he could have even described the characters
I think more interestingly. Personally, it seemed to me that
he does refer a couple of times to using a diary. He said
sometimes in fact he was so hungry for experience which he could then
put into his diary that he would go out and like take a bicycle
out in the snow or something so he could write about it in his diary.
And it seemed to me that a lot of the book seemed to be just taken from
a diary and rather hastily transformed into memoir.
Bill:
h .
Jonathan:
I mean and so for that reason that's why I think that the
later portion where he is thinking about himself with his wife and the
baby I think it is more thoughtful, I think he is actually more thoughtful about what he is doing and what he has been doing. And he is able to digest the experience better and
write about it better I think.
Caitl:
I agree.
Jonathan:
I mean you know the other part is entertaining, but I
think it could have been more entertaining if he'd and
I do think if it hadn't been interweaved. I was finding the first part kind of boring.
Caitl:
I didn't find that the characters entirely original. I think I
felt like I had.
Bill:
Predictable?
Caitl:
No, but just not necessarily characters that I had never seen
before. And the one I did enjoy very much was the circus scene.
The circus scene I thought that passage about the parrot woman with the tattoos.
Bill:
h .
Caitl:
In the side show was really that was well written I thought. But
Bill:
Did you think most of those stories are supposed to be true?
Caitl:
Well.
Bill:
Are they.
Caitl:
I
Bill:
I mean would he have.
Caitl:
Well see it's hard to say because he really takes himself very
seriously I think in this book and so to assume that he was
exaggerating for comic effect doesn't seem to be possible.
Bill:
What about this whole notion of it being a memoir,
which in some definitions is an accounting of something truthful
and but I I don't know if in literature. Jonathan if this supposed to
be something that has to be accounted for along the way. I guess maybe
I'm thinking that the scenes by the river for this conversation we will
call those the nature scenes maybe are more believable and are sort
of from the heart rather than on the road stories. You know he had a
hard time finding time or the inclination to write anything down in his
journal so he really had to go back and sort of recall all of those.
Jonathan:
Memory, well an autobiography is traditionally to be
taken with a pinch of salt. I mean you can believe what people say in
their memoirs, but it is not surely without some fictional elements.
People can be as truthful as they want to be but it can be hard to
reconstruct exactly what happened and you may reconstruct in such a way
as throws yourself in a good light. So to that extent I think that if some of it seems far fetched I mean it may be and maybe
not who knows? But it certainly makes for an entertaining read. He
does try to be very honest with himself, does he not. When he is facing
eminent fatherhood he really faces up to the really nasty and
anti-social emotions that he sometimes feels and he is honest about
that.
Caitl:
I think I agree. I think that was the most successful is when he
is describing his fears. That's when I felt he is being the most honest.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Caitl:
And even the scenes in the woods.
I just thought that I have no doubt that he has a wide range of
knowledge about nature and but it seemed.
Bill:
Forced.
Caitl:
Yeah.
Bill:
What about his writing style.
Jonathan:
Well, I would like to come back to what you said -- the idea of
it being forced because I think that when he describes tracking
animals I think that seemed interesting, and I believed him that he
knew all about that.
Caitl:
h
Jonathan:
Because he wrote with a kind of unpretentious directness
about animal tracks in a way that I I thought I could
believe. But when he starts thinking about dinosaurs and
the various gynecological facts about his wife and so
on that you know it can be very bookish and seems like he has
swallowed an encyclopedia.
Caitl:
I think that.
Jonathan:
Sometimes.
(Everyone laughs)
Jonathan:
And he gets that in and it sometimes seems rather radical
rather starch shift. I think he is at his best when he's just
plainly describing events or emotions.
Caitl:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
I think he's at his worst when he strives for a fact as for
instance in this case when he says, "they got some America on fold in
every direction as I traveled the interstate bloodstream dodging the
white corpuscles of perverts, cops, and outlaws." And where as I see he
is trying to make make a metaphor where America is a body and therefore,
policemen are white corpuscles and it seemed a bit strained.
Caitl:
h .
Jonathan:
And I think sometimes when he tries for metaphoric
effects it seems a bit strained.
.
Caitl:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
Other times he's fine and I think sometimes he just strives
for effect too much.
Bill:
What about the imagery, "cardinals sliced the air like drops of
blood."
Jonathan:
Forced.
Bill:
You think so.
Jonathan:
Yeah because I don't see drops of blood when I see cardinals.
Bill:
Tona, you are not getting in there .
Tona:
Well you know I am thinking all the time is that I see him
throughout this thing as a person who's struggling to find himself
and a very troubled person.
Bill:
h .
Tona:
Really, and I see him struggling to be a writer too. And I
think that he has a great deal of promise but he's a
person who started out you know in not the best family circumstances and
and that he's different from me.
Bill:
Although.
Tona:
And I think that's one thing that's interesting 'like you
were saying I'll never do these things; I'll never meet these people not
the way he has and so I sort of even though yeah I think there are a lot
of places where I feel like his writing gives you pause. (laughs)
and you're kind of oh come on you know, get it together ...
Bill:
Well, of course, the
Tona:
but
Bill:
The best way for someone to determine that is to is to read this
book and make up their minds for themselves and before our time
gets away being our our final book of the year I want to quickly ask
you what your favorite book for the bookclub @ KET our first year on
the air and we're coming back next year but Dava not your very
favorite but some of the selections that you enjoyed out of the
twelve that we read this year.
Dava:
Um I don't want to use the word favorite.
Bill:
Question
Dava:
But
Bill:
Well
Dava:
I really really really enjoyed Come and Go Molly Snow by Mary Ann
Taylor Hall. That book really haunted me. I could see
images of Molly walking through the forest like she would have visioned
her walking through the forest and with her hair blond and her dress
on. I could still see that even months later and I could see
her playing her fiddle still in the deserted cabin.
Bill:
h .
Dava:
But, as far as a book that is just for grins I really liked the
Natural Man. I mean that is just funny stuff.
Caitl:
Yeah.
(everyone laughs)
Bill:
Wonder what book you enjoyed or how many times have you read it.
Caitl:
Oh gosh. Countless.
Bill:
If if Natural.
Caitl:
It's a great book.
Bill:
Of course it is and and that's why it's on our list.
(everyone laughs)
Bill:
But if that was number one and again I don't want to do two
threes and that sort of thing but what else did you enjoy reading.
Caitl:
Wow. We read well Memory of Old Jack is one of my all time
favorites. I just love that book but all new books that I have never read
before. The Healing and Secrets of a Fire King both were just great.
Bill:
h .
Caitl:
Great books.
Bill:
h .
Caitl:
Loved The Healing.
Bill:
Jonathan?
Jonathan:
Well I don't want to seem that I didn't enjoy Natural Man
because I did.
(everyone laughs)
Jonathan:
Great comic novel. But I think also The Healing. I go for
that as one of the high points. I think it's just a marvelous command
of voice, marvelous dialog and as a first person narrator it's superb;
but the other one I liked very much was Bobbie Ann Mason's book of
stories which I thought the characterization was very good and
very understated. She just does a great job
with just a few brush strokes you know.
Bill:
And Tona you really liked Chris Offut's book?
Tona:
Yes I did. But another one I really enjoyed was
Storming Heaven. Because I had sort of a different idea of what that
book was going to be like and it was much different and I just felt
like I learned a lot about the the mining struggles the
union struggles and all that.
Bill:
Well, we want to remind everybody that we will be
back next year. We have our book marks printed and our books chosen and
they're all going to be on our web site so we want to tell everybody
to go to the bookclub@ket website and as somebody also mentioned to
me these would make wonderful Christmas presents wouldn't they -- at
least a couple of the first ones. Our January selection
is The Last Day by Glenn Kleier who is from down in
Louisville so we look forward to being back next year and having a lot
of conversation about some great books. As we conclude with The Same
River Twice the question might be Chris Offutt still a fairly young
man at 43 or 4 right now I think something like that having written some
other short stories and some other works where do you think he is
going to fit in the writing of Kentucky in 10 or 15 or 20
years. We've mentioned Ed McClanahan who has his place and Wendell Berry who certainly is one of the most heralded writers in
Kentucky history I think is fair to say, plus we could name many many
more. Where do you think he is going to end up Tona or where is he
right now.
Tona:
Well I think it kind of depends on where he goes from here. This
is the only work of his I have read.
Bill:
h .
Tona:
But .
Bill:
This was an early work. He has done two or three maybe a couple
of things since then.
Tona:
yeah.
Dava:
I will be interested to see because I really did like his first
book of short stories Kentucky Straight but it will be interesting to
see if he moves away from the eastern Kentucky thing.
Bill:
I think he is in Iowa now. He left Morehead he was here last
year and now he's back in Iowa at the university.
Jonathan:
When you said eastern Kentucky.
Dava:
See where he goes.
Jonathan:
Eastern Kentucky thing as you said I think that one of the
themes of the book is what it is to be from eastern
Kentucky and it's a self-portrait of a Kentuckian I think, and he is very
good at exploring his emotions that when he goes to new places like
New York and Minnesota and meets people who have stereotypical ideas of what
Kentucky is.
Caitl:
h .
Jonathan:
I think he is very good at describing how he thinks and feels
about that and describing it is to come from
eastern Kentucky and that's one of his strengths I
think. You continue to draw from that.
Caitl:
h .
Tona:
You know what it made me think of? The Dollmaker is on the list next
year and that starts out with the woman's attachment to the land,
but it is so different and then she goes to the city and I think
comparing this is really.
Bill:
Not that we all don't have that eastern Kentucky baggage if you
will. Sort of being withdrawn a bit until he gets to know some
people not being quite as worldly as some of the other people that he
meets and that sort of thing and maybe he sort of holds back
in a way. |
