pedantic nuthatch

Chris Offutt is on solid ground establishing the story of Virgil Caudill, a dweller in the impoverished hill country of Kentucky. The author has a knack for the rhythms of speech in the this part of the country, and for the outrageously funny stories its denizens can tell one another. Here, Virgil is out hitchhiking, and Arlow has picked him up.

"Not on me," Virgil said. "What are we celebrating?"

"I quit my wife tonight."

"For good?"

"I hope to God for good. Know what she done this time?"

"No."

"Cut the fingertips out of my gloves. Left them laying in a pile like deer sign by the couch."

"What over?"

"Porch steps."

"Were you supposed to fix them?"

"No," Arlow said. "I gave them away."

"Gave away the porch steps?"

"They was concrete block, stacked. First my brother needed one, then my cousin, and my nephew. Didn't take too long before they was gone."

"A man can always get block."

"That's what I told my wife. She said yes, but did everybody have to get them off us." (p. 64)

Like Ernest Hemingway before him, Offutt achieves a deadpan poetry in simple sentences. He can write for paragraphs without calling on a dependent clause or semicolon.

Darkness grew at the head of the hollow and filtered down the creek. The air between the trees closed. He stood and kicked one of Boyd's old liquor bottle lids. It rolled in a circle like a crippled dog. A hundred years from now some kid would find the cap and make up its history. Virgil wished he could invent a new history for himself, or even better, a future. (p. 41)

It is when Virgil acts to create a new history for himself that Offutt, an accomplished short story writer, steps onto stonier land. Virgil avenges his brother Boyd's murder, then flees west, finally stopping in Missoula, Montana. Calling himself Joe Tiller, Virgil soon becomes associated with a scrawny citizens' militia. The ultimate revelation of the survivalist band's secret is none too surprising; Virgil comes to terms with his past, but the book's resolution feels incomplete. The novel, published in 1997, already feels a bit dated in its preoccupation with Rocky Mountain commandos.

Still, Joe gets some traction observing Montana social customs from an outsider's perspective. For instance, a Missoula girl will bite logo patch off a boy's jeans if she intends to go steady with him, so we read.