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?
