Christ Offut is the author of many short stories and novels and several memoirs. I read MY FATHER, THE PORNOGRAPHER, a memoir a few years back.
I think I have read some of these stories elsewhere.
I really like his style. The stories are spare, lean. Very little use of adverbs or adjective and yet we feel immersed in the Kentucky or in Nebraska, where he happens to set the story.
In the two stories here, these are men and women living hardscrabble lives. Language is sparse too,
In the title story, a new family member is sent to fetch a brother-in-law hospitalized, four states away. He has been shot by a woman. The trip is a long one and when he gets there the man is dead from an embolism. Gerald asks to see the woman whose gunshot led to the death. Her story of the incident is as nutty as you might expect in a story like this. He persuades the sheriff to let him take the body home and on the way home, he invents a story that might be easier to hear to his new family. Exactly the kind of story I find satisfying because the writing elevates it, the characters seem real, the setting sparkles.
Todd Mason--for any Charles Portis fans, follow Todd's links to register for the free webinar tonight
11 comments:
I still need to read his book on his father, Andrew Offutt, among other things a writer of individually-commissioned porn novels, and famously an abrasive Character. I don't envy him that relation.
Were you focusing on two of the stories, out of the eight in this 1999 book? 24 years ago already...and no few of the magazines the stories originally appeared in, including the revival of STORY, GLIMMER TRAIN, and I think DOUBLETAKE as well, folded and fading from memory. I still need to read his collections, as well.
As with Todd, I need to read his works. I read some of his father's fantasy and sword and sorcery novels and enjoyed them; then I tried to slog through one of his SPACEWAY novels as "John Cleve" -- it did not go well.
The novel about his father is rather amazing in that his mother helped to type the pornographic novels he was writing.
Yeah, I meant to discuss the second story too but ran out of time.
Well, the porn fiction business was (and remains) simply a business...if in his case (fiction written on commission from one customer, for one customer/reader) an oddly (though not uniquely) specific one.
Basically, the porn wasn't the most Difficult thing about Andy Offutt, as the memoir (I gather, having heard interviews with Chris Offutt over the years) makes clear (as do the accounts others have recorded about him, in various ways).
All sympathies in the result of "Well, there's a bit more I'd like to say here, but it'll have to wait"...
I've enjoyed Chris Offutt's novels COUNTRY DARK and THE KILLING HILLS. And, like Jerry and Todd, I've read several of Andy Offut's fantasy novels.
Totally agree. I read a lot of Offutt's books this past year, including the three memoirs, the series mysteries and the short stories. The title story here was indeed memorable, and as soon as you mentioned it, all the nutty details came back to me. I like his writing a lot.
Speaking of good writing, after last week's review here I got Edward P. Jones's LOST IN THE CITY, and he is just a terrific writer. You can really see the people and places he writes about in Washington, D.C. in your mind. The library doesn't have his second collection (ALL AUNT HAGAR'S CHILDREN), so I think I'll have to buy it when I finish this one. The first day of school story, the woman who gets a call at 2 am that her mother just died, these are things that stick in the mind.
As Todd alluded to, the father's personality was the problem with the Offutts, but there is definitely a case made that when he stopped working outside the home and became a full time writer was when he changed for the worse, and his relationship with his kids in particular got much more troubling. He doesn't specifically, as far as I remember, come write out and say it was the porn, but you can read it between the lines if you want to.
Details can really make a story. Jones has a history of writing a book and then disappearing.
That title story does sound very good. I think I picked up one or two of Chris Offutt's books at the book sale.
I probably met Andy Offutt at an SF con in the early 1970s and also interviewed him for my college newspaper (his novel "The Castle Keeps" was set in Lexington, KY, where I was going to school). In our encounters over 40+ years of congoing, including when I was running programing at Louisville's Rivercon, I found him to be very opinionated, but I do not recall him being abrasive to me or my friends. Still, I do not doubt the picture of him presented in "My Father The Pornographer."
Currently, I am in an APA with Chris' mother, but she has not contributed anything in a while. It also should be noted that while all of The Spaceways novels were written under a pseudonym that Andy often used, some of them were farmed out to other writers.
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