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“An awful lot of fiction is immensely autobiographical, and a lot of nonfiction is highly imagined,” writes David Shields in Reality Hunger. “We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. ‘Fiction/nonfiction’ is an utterly useless distinction.” A life is lived in secret among ruptures and congealings of comprehension. To express the quality of such experience, some writers reach far. But even conventional writers are drawn to disruptive contexts, themes and devices. Cross-genre writing is their new speed lane to resonant or errant confusions.

Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction includes eight stories that follow him through southwest Texas and Mexico, an ambitious but unlucky journalist looking for the feature story that will make his fortune. Four chapters are noted as factual, four as fiction. “Within this chronicle, every attempt has been made to separate the fact from the fabrication,” he writes in the introduction. “Chapters identified as the former can be trusted not to deviate from what happened in real life, regardless of how novel or incredible they may seem; events related in chapters of the latter category are wholly invented. I do not wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done, only to permit the real to mingle with the imagined, as it does in the deserted labyrinth of the mind.”

So in effect, Silverstein hasn’t blended genres at all to dissolve an “utterly useless distinction.” On the contrary, he has built a border. But like the boundary between Texas and Mexico, it’s a leaky membrane. The actual purpose for his display of alternating fiction and reportage is to prove a dual virtuosity, and he succeeds. I soon stopped caring about true-or-false and simply enjoyed Silverstein’s engaging feature writing.

In the first “true” story, Silverstein recalls arriving in Marfa, Texas about ten years ago in an ’82 Corolla for a job at the local paper. He writes, “My idea was to learn the trade at a newspaper, where I would amass some clips and eventually turn up a story significant enough to sell top a magazine, whereupon I would be launched into a career as a freelance journalist.” His first attempt at journalism involves a search for the grave of Ambrose Bierce, which leads to a hunt for the cave dwelling of the devil himself. Since it is difficult to buy into Silverstein’s supposed avidity for such mysteries (his tone is not convincing as a naïf), one senses the mechanics of fictionalization in this “true” story. This is the book’s conceit: the narrator cultivates our affection through his humility and arid strivings, while producing the very essays that establish his quite otherwise glorious reputation.

Silverstein’s tales are filled with intriguing local characters, weird coincidences, cultural happenings, and confounding mysteries. Two of my favorite “true” pieces involve the opening of a McDonald’s in Zacatecas in northern Mexico and the famously treacherous automobile race, La Carrera Panamericana. (As Carolyn Kellogg
notes in the LA Times, Silverstein’s “explanation of how he wound up living in Zacatecas is funny, full of coincidence and a great story, but the truth is that he went there on a Fulbright Fellowship.”) In these stories, the narrator relaxes into observation and affable asides, the telling leavened by wry humor and affection for his characters. Twain’s Roughing It echoed during my reading.

In the following passage, the doors of the Zacatecas McDonald’s open for the first time:

“Such a thrust was then made as to recall the Spanish storming of the great pyramid mound of Huitzilopochtli. Kinds sprang through the door. Men rode full tilt against each other. Women waded in. All of this was accompanied with the yelling of a military advance. As we made our object, the seizing of territory commenced. Small bands staked tables and dispatched parties to rush the counter. A mob of gifted children tore off their shoes and scaled the plastic tubes, screaming with glee. Bedlam reigned. The kitchen oil roared as new fries were introduced … Forty rookies scuttled to fill orders. As the first customers turned with their food and struggled to regain their families, sodas began to tumble from trays, perfuming the air with a sugary bouquet …”

Eight years ago, Silverstein published a piece in Harper’s about attending a poetry competition and convention in Reno, revised for this collection. In this “true” story, he asks us to believe that he is the type of person who would actually vie for a $10,000 prize by writing the event’s best horrible poem. It is more likely that he adapted the “facts” for the purposes of an entirely invented premise and self-characterization. “Poets, it occurred to me, must make very good marks,” he writes. “Even half a poet liike myself was still credulous enough to get roped in.” But his credulity is a put-up job. In the sixth “fiction” chapter, Silverstein sits in a cantina reading Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, suddenly able to tell the difference between amateur verse and the work of a master. Still, as long as one doesn’t take Silverstein’s “fact” as fact, the stories work just fine.

If I tell you that Silverstein’s final “fiction” chapter deserves comparison with Borges’ metaphysical tales, you may think this is hyperbole. But I’m serious. It concerns Baker Tenholtz, a man with a passion for all forms of stenography – and writing down in shorthand everything that happens to him. As a child he had been mysteriously separated from his family after a car crash and is now searching for his sister. Faux-Silverstein replies to his want ad for a driving companion, and the story begins. Silverstein knows how to let air into his story, a space for speculation and resonance. It’s a wonderful piece.

Much could be said about Silverstein’s fluency in establishing a sense of place. The star of this book may be the locale itself where “in the unshaded sun, thoughts twist like timbers, turning from memory to fantasy to silence … the beauty is pitiless and unusual.” I believe Silverstein’s claim that his locations triggered and warped his stories – so much so that I don’t quite understand why he insists for the neat division between fact and fiction in the first place. Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a marvelous fabrication.

 

[Published by W.W. Norton April 19, 2010. 231 pages, $23.95 hardcover]