NONFICTION - Jan. 24, 1993

THE SAME RIVER TWICE: A Memoir by Chris Offutt (Simon & Schuster: $18; 188 pp.). Before becoming a fiction writer, and now memoirist, Chris Offutt had set his sights on becoming an actor, a painter, a playwright and a poet. It’s difficult to take these aspirations seriously, however, for between leaving his native Appalachia at 19 and enrolling in the writing program at the University of Iowa in his early 30s, Offutt was essentially a drifter, taking whatever odd jobs came his way: dishwasher at the Grand Canyon, naturalist in Florida, fake “trained walrus” in a traveling circus. Offutt makes sly fun of his failed ambitions--”Anyone could quit,” he writes of poetry; “It required real courage never to begin”--but both Offutt and the reader know that experiential self-exile is an appropriate apprenticeship for the craft of writing. Offutt, who published the story collection “Kentucky Straight” last year, alternates his tales of roaming with an account of his wife’s first pregnancy, and the contrast between his footloose and domestic lives is stark. Offutt’s description of preparing for the birth isn’t sentimental, but neither is it particularly original, making his day-labor stories (a little embroidered, no doubt) the most absorbing part of the book. While working as a journeyman house painter in Texas, for example, Offutt asked his friendly, good-looking foreman whether he had been successfully propositioned on the job. The foreman replied, thoughtfully, “The problem is what to do with your wet brush.”