The Same River Twice . . . and Why I Won't Be Stepping In It Again

Chris Offutt's second book (and first memoir) wasn't bad by any means . . . but I had a few problems with it, as previously noted. And a couple of other things that ended up bothering me as I rounded the clubhouse turn.

For one thing, the overuse of the terms lingham and yoni for the (respectively) male and female sex organs. It seemed both pretentious and precious. Especially coming from a guy who is primarily selling himself as a backwoods Kentucky boy.

For another thing, there was a very vivid description of birth near the end of the book, which is fine in and of itself, but for me it was just way too much. I've seen three children born. I don't need the details. But that's just my problem.

One last thing . . . and a big big deal to me. There was a passage on page 181 that really made me like Mr. Offutt quite a bit less. Here it is:

" . . . I recalled a psychology class field trip to a center for children abandoned to the state. Room after room contained naked idiots. At puberty they had to be taught to masturbate; otherwise they dry-humped furniture and smaller kids. The prize was a hydrocephalic nine-month-old with a head the size of a wheelbarrow, flattened by gravity from lying on its side. The four skull plates were clearly delineated as if floating beneath the surface."

That is just fucking cruel, you know? And there's no reason for this half of a paragraph to even exist. It adds nothing to the story of the birth of Chris Offutt's son. I can't imagine why an editor didn't strike it from the manuscript. It just makes Offutt look like an insensitive asshole.

And that's not how I want to see him. Not at all. But once you see you can't unsee. 

I'm still going to try to read the rest of his books--The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. I don't want my admiration for the first two books of his that I read--My Father, the Pornographer and Kentucky Straight--to be spoiled by one half of a paragraph. But I have to admit that those nasty words had a palpable effect on me. There's never an excuse for premeditated cruelty.