Jake Silverstein, the editor of the award-winning Texas Monthly and a contributing editor at Harper’s, has published his first book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did. Opening with his early days as a somewhat hapless reporter for a newspaper in Marfa, Texas, Silverstein’s eight chapters alternate between real and imagined, mucking up that closely-guarded line between fiction and reality. I reviewed it in Sunday’s LA Times:
Between writing about city council meetings, ranches and drought, he did a lot of driving. His stories are as much about the people and places he comes to know as they are about where his mind takes him along the way.
Sun and solitude and desert roads led to hallucinatory leaps. Thinking he’s discovered a way to find Ambrose Bierce, Silverstein starts asking locals where they’ve seen the Devil. Later, following the La Carrera Panamericana car race, he turns up a history of crashes so bloody it makes “Death Race 2000” look like “Mary Poppins.” These stories, so extraordinary and surreal, could not possibly be true. But they are.
Perhaps it was their strangeness that gave Silverstein the idea to fill out the book with fictions. It’s an unusual, counterintuitive move.
In recent years, the fluid boundary between fact and fiction has displaced more than one writer. There was James Frey, whose exaggerated sins set him on Oprah’s couch, apologizing. Or Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, of the New Republic and the New York Times, respectively, who were caught making things up instead of reporting — both lost their jobs. Such incidents suggest a rumbling cultural anxiety about truth and fiction, as explored in the new book “Reality Hunger” by David Shields.
Silverstein addresses the issue head on. “I do not wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done” he writes in the preface, “only to permit the real to mingle with the imagined, as it does in the deserted labyrinth of the mind.”
I’m currently fascinated by the fiction-reality trespassers and was delighted to read Silverstein’s book. It turns out he had previous published all the nonfiction pieces (in Harper’s); the fiction pieces are written around them, providing a glue and arc. I think it’s a fine approach, but a unique one. Now I’m curious how the next trespasser will see the lay of the land.
