At first it seemed odd, reading Hank Stuever’s “Off Ramp” while swilling rum and watching the waves in Jamaica. The book is subtitled “Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere.”
But it didn’t take Stuever long to bring the great American elsewhere to my little island. As I was reading his meditation on the omnipresence of the plastic chair, I looked up to spy a whole herd of said chairs milling around right there between me and the Caribbean Sea. Small world. And in many ways, that’s the point of Stuever’s writing. It’s not the grandiose that catches his eye. It’s the small things — plastic chairs, two regular kids getting married, the guy whose couch is too big to be carried up the stairs — that reveal so much about what it’s like to live in early 21st century America. Hank sweats the small things, putting them under the microscope and marveling at them, revealing more about life than a hundred Kerry campaign stories ever will.
To quote Hank: “The great American Noplace makes sense to me as a journalist preoccupied with how life feels, and what it’s like to live in milennial times.”
That sense of milennial times reverberates throughout the slices of life in his book, a collection of stories he wrote while working at the Albuquerque Tribune, the Austin American-Statesman and most recently, the Washington Post. The big bang. Space. Emptiness. A creeping sense of entropy filters through these meditations, but it’s always countered by flare-ups of simple beauty and the glow of common people being wonderfully common.
I worked with Hank in Albuquerque, and I’ve been a fan from the start. I’ve engaged in boozy, heated arguments over the merits of Hank’s style of journalism, coming to his defense when the “hard news” whores wanted to write Hank off as fluff. I’m amazed at how much he’s grown as a writer in the past decade or so. I’d argue he’s one of the best journalists of our time.
I guess the only criticism I have of “Off Ramp” is the “updating” that’s grafted onto the end of several stories. It’s sometimes abrupt and a bit, well, after the fact. It feels almost like a Dragnet epilogue. It’s the peril, I guess, of pulling together stories that were written several years ago. And it’s almost as jarring when there is no update. I can’t help but wonder: What ever happened to Andy and Darlene, the two kids whose wedding Hank chronicles in unflinching detail? Are they still married? What are they doing now? How did life work out for them?
7 replies on “The great American elsewhere …”
‘sounds intriguing. i went to hank’s website and read a few pieces. he’s a talented guy.
The hard news whores won, Bob. Features departments at all but the largest papers have been gutted of staff, space and resources. Just try to write 80 inches about anything in a features department these days.
Well, that might not be such a bad thing given the pabulum that passes for features at a lot of small and mid-size papers. Though the same could be said for hard news … I guess I wouldn’t say the hard-news whores won. We all lost. Features and news are in a pretty sorry state in most small and mid-markets. Some large markets, too. I guess that’s what a lack of true competition helps breed …
Feature writers like you and Hank clearly are the exception, not the rule, unfortunately. Same goes for hard news coverage. There just aren’t that many great reporters out there. I guess real talent goes where there’s more money. The folks who are left are either so passionate about journalism that they stay despite the pay and insurance-office setting or so incompetent that nowhere else will have them.
Also, I still kinda hate that great “feature writers” get ghetto-ized back in features. I think if newspapers recruited truly great feature writers and then displayed their work prominently on the main page, it might help drive readership. It certainly would infuse the papers with a bit more attitude and personality. Some of my favorite Hank stories were the ones where he was sent out to cover a routine news story — a book signing, a fire — and he turned it on its head and made it a great read that transcended the mundane details of the event.
I’ve been looking for a job for two years, Bob, and I can’t get one. I get cut from features jobs because I don’t have any clips on 101 Things to do With Wallpaper, and I get cut from news jobs because I haven’t spent the last five years writing inverted pyramid stories about city council meetings.
leanne, i can highly recommend unemployment as a career move. maybe we could go to jamaica to help alleviate the signage problem that bob has pointed out. how’s your penmanship? feelin’ irie, mon…
The problem is, Jo, I’m not unemployed. I’m underemployed, a fate you shouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. I work with morons and lifers in a newspaper factory owned by a redneck millionaire so far to the right politically that lefties like you and me need a pair of binoculars to find him.
i just left a company that was founded by ross perot. both james baker (bush’s secretary of state) and dick cheney were on the board. i was among the youngest on my team since no folks with more current skills will take the crap that they’re now serving up (except in india and brazil, of course!). believe me, i know what it’s like. i finally decided it was time to drop the “der” from my title.