Review by Booklist Review
An outrageously funny memoir by an up-and-coming writer of fiction who grew up in the Kentucky Appalachians. He moved to New York, where he initially mistook Puerto Ricans for African Americans and their Spanish for urban patois. After shacking up with an obeah woman, he moved to the Twin Cities, where he fell in with small-time Ecuadoran hoods in the illegal punchboard racket, and a Chippewa roommate with genitals of legendary proportions. He hitched his way cross-country, went skydiving, brawled in bars--that sort of thing, the latter-day hippie life. Offutt's humor is Rabelaisian, his book's structure picaresque. And the veracity of his adventures? Better not to ask. The account of his wife's pregnancy, however, which comprises the book's poignant, even chapters, certainly rings true. --Roland Wulbert
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
What keeps this first book by Offut from becoming a familiar nonfictional Bildungsroman is the author's sensitivity to nature and his lyrical prose in writing about it. Offut, however, is far less successful in describing people: his memoir is populated by a predictable array of derelicts, oddballs and near-psychotics as he journeys around the U.S., dreaming alternately of becoming an actor, a painter, a playwright and a poet, yet usually doing little to realize his aspirations. Only those who are intrigued by America's social underside will enjoy Offut's portraits of human flotsam. The underlying plot of the book concerns his wife's pregnancy and the birth of their first child, a son, but neither Offut's approach to nor his words about this subject are original. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A new and promising writer, Offutt records his rocky road to manhood and becoming a writer. Whether hitching a ride with a dangerous character or working as a walrus in a traveling circus, he felt compelled to keep a journal. He left Appalachia at 19 and took a decade to realize he was sinking ever deeper into failure. Finally, he changed course, got married, and, with the encouragement of his wife, enrolled in a writing program. The results were a 1990 Michener Award for short fiction and a collection of stories, Kentucky Straight (Random, 1992). In his current volume, by turns lyrical and graphic, outrageous and sensitive, tragic and hilarious, Offutt writes of the 29 stitches his wife required after childbirth, how his mother spoke ``gentle as rain,'' and of the twinkling of beaver saliva on fresh wood chips in the Iowa woods where he now lives. Strong writing in a memoir of particular interest to academic libraries.-- Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Offutt follows up his collection of agrarian short stories (Kentucky Straight, 1992--not reviewed) with a picaresque tale of a decade on the road. The author is the protagonist in this engaging and irreverent story, much of which may even be factual. But even if some of the details may not be literally true, as a cynical reader might suspect, the book is sometimes truly literate. Offutt, almost as enamored with Figures of Speech as he is with Mother Nature, devises some similes (``a city as cold as crowbar''; ``predictable as diarrhea'') that are more adroit than others (``The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a water color background with too much paint''). The author sprang from the foothills of Appalachia (where the terrain is ``humped like a kicked rug'') before he turned 20. Before he was 30, not so long ago, he passed through New York and Minnesota, California and the Everglades, the plains, mountains, and swamps of America. Drifting his way past redoubts of poverty and outposts of counterculture, Offutt sought his fortune, perhaps as an actor, perchance as a playwright or maybe as a poet. What he found, besides sex, was occasional work as a dishwasher, a mosquito-plagued naturalist, and a faux walrus in a surreal, flea- bitten circus. (A job promotion's upward mobility: He was allowed to sleep under the truck.) The effect is Candide following the path of Orwell down and out in Paris and London. Threaded throughout is the moving journal of Offutt's wife's pregnancy and the birth of the Offutt scion. Finally, Offutt tends his own garden beside a river in America's heartland as he offers an acute reconstruction of things that may have passed. As the old adage has it, you can't step into the same river twice. Even so, a dip into this stream of self-consciousness is an entertaining pastime.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
