Rate this book

Nothing Happened And Then It Did: A Chronicle In Fact And Fiction (2010)

by Jake Silverstein(Favorite Author)

3.35 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0393076466 (ISBN13: 9780393076462)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Uneven, but frequently clever. The format of the book is ingenious, if a little precious: it switches off between fact and fiction every other chapter, and Silverstein labels the chapters because he does not "wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done." The result is a patchwork novel-memoir chronicling the author's attempt (and spectacular failure) to be a real writer of some stripe, first a journalist and then a poet and then a journalist again. The first three chapters deliver hugely on the promise of the premise. There's the hilariously uneventful account of his search for the bones of Ambrose Bierce in and around Marfa, Texas. There's the tall tale of the very German New Yorker photographer looking for "ze shot" to convey the soul of Mid... moreland, Texas in a single picture. (Ze shot ends up pitting the teuton against junkyard dogs.) And there's the horribly true account of Silverstein's sojourn in Reno to compete for $25,000 after receiving a letter from the clearly bogus Famous Poet's Society. (He knows it's bogus, but he needs the money, and he predicts that competition at such an event won't be too stiff. This proves to be hubris. How will he compete with the man who wrote a poem about everyone in the world praying for world peace for a solid week in all the different time zones, complete with a chart illustrating the effectiveness of this scheme? He didn't know you could use visual aids! Or with the man whose poem includes the line "it takes both sunshine and rain to make rainbows"? So those are funny and awesome and include some smart, incisive stuff about the nature of journalism and poetry and fiction and truth-telling and whatnot. The rest is kind of a whiff. Somehow, the long, long true chapter about the deadliest road race in the world is kind of boring? I'm not sure how that happened.
review 2: It started slow but ultimately I really, really enjoyed this first novel by Jake Silverstein.I don't really care about the conceit--it's supposed to be part fiction and part fact. I read it as all fiction. Jake, the narrator is on a quest to become a journalist. Yet he's never in the right place at the right time to actually make it happen. He meanders from West Texas to Mexico to Louisiana to Nevada and then back to Mexico. Over the course of many different vignettes and adventures, Jake's story morphed into a pretty tight book both in theme and plotting.It's completely derivative of Hunter S. Thompson and Kerouac and all that great American road novel jazz, but, on the other hand, it's not. There is something really fresh and interesting about the perspective, especially the parts about being an ex-pat in the Mexican state that has the most migration to the US of them all. And I laughed out loud a lot. Especially during the poetry competition. Making fun of the New Yorker was awesome too. More than anything though, there was something both real and relatable about Jake. He's in his mid-20s, in the first decade of the new millenium doing all of the things his forbearers did before him (ie journalists) to make a career, but not finding the success they had. I experienced some generational resonance reading his tale of woe and discovery. Also very well written. less

Download links for: Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction

Advertising