Chris Offutt's fiction has always been about confinement and freedom, and what makes people, Southerners in particular, flee their birthplaces and what ultimately draws them back. He sums up this phenomenon, as well as a little background behind his return to his hometown of Morehead, Ky., in the opening pages of No Heroes with a crisp, indelible style:

        “Kentuckians have a big tradition of going west for a new life and winding up homesick instead. Some went nuts, some got depressed and some made do. I did a little of all three. I finagled an interview for a teaching position at the only four-year university in the hills. It was more of a high school with ashtrays than a genuine college. I know. Twenty years ago, I graduated from there.”

        No Heroes, Mr. Offutt's fifth offering, and his second memoir, is by turns tragic, comic, sympathetic and nihilistic in its adjective-free appraisals on present rural culture, a rueful reminder that you can go home again, but you may not be happy once you are there.

        In one-half of the book, the author acquaints the reader, and reacquaints himself, with a world that, since his departure, has lost the battle to retain its close-knit, bygone ways to the Wal-Martization of small town life. As one might expect, drugs, despair and complacency accessorize this new landscape.

        No Heroes, is an intensely introspective work, which is good because little happens.

        The plot is simple. After returning “to teach writing in a region where thirty percent of the people were functionally illiterate,” Mr. Offutt encounters resistance to his teaching methods and an air of suspicion regarding his 20 year self-exile. In the end, he reluctantly leaves for the more prestigious University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.

        His abbreviated homecoming is rendered as remote and strange as the script of a David Lynch film. The town's video rental store, where he finds a wealth of local color, yields this type of conversation between the author and a childhood friend:

        “Palms.”

        “That's what normal skin is supposed to look like, son. It's from taking lots of carotene. That's why they call carrots carrots, on account of the color.”

        “I didn't know that,” Mr. Offutt replies.

        “People are startin' to get knowledged about it. You know, the Internet and whatnot.”

        “You're on the Internet?”

        “Why sure. Best thing that's come here since town water. That e-mail cooks with gas, don't it.”

        These immortal exchanges run the length of the book and Mr. Offutt again plays the role of cultural anthropologist, gathering data about the hill people, his people, and reporting back from the field.

        The other portion of the book remains separate and distinct. As with his first memoir, The Same River Twice, he chooses two ongoing narratives that alternate, every other chapter, throughout. In this instance, Mr. Offutt looks at the hardships endured by his in-laws, known to us as Arthur and Irene, while held in a Nazi forced labor camp during World War II.

        There's obviously an ulterior statement to be made when laying the Kentucky hills and the Jewish Holocaust side by side, we're just never quite sure what this is. It stands as the book's only flaw, and unfortunately one that interrupts Mr. Offutt's otherwise interesting personal story.

        Readers might be happiest when the author is at his funniest, and Mr. Offutt is a funny writer. He offers none of the stand-up routine mockery that is often in play when someone of his sensibilities turns their sights on the plain-spoken and homespun. It takes more of a gentle vision when capturing the siren song of home.

        “The hills surrounded me like the dome walls of a snow globe that you shake. Everything in my life was turned over and I was waiting for the flurries to settle.”

        Add to that vision a singular eloquence of prose, and readers will experience a personal journey lifted to universal significance.

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