The members of the One-Man Book Club have been reading ‘em faster than all the members (total: one) can get on here to blogscuss ‘em. I’m going to try to clear out all the One-Man Book Club recent selections this week, and include some selections where the membership couldn’t finish the book. Ready? Chug!

To start, here’s a book I liked very much and recommend to others: Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, by Jake Silverstein, which came out in the spring. I dug it deeply, starting with the title and alluring jacket. But another journalist I know (someone who is really keen about innovation in nonfiction), said he dropped out after page 40 or thereabouts. So there’s that.

Silverstein is the new(ish) editor of Texas Monthly. This book ingeniously and even bizarrely weaves together some of his longer non-fiction pieces (from Harper’s magazine in the ’00s) and short fiction stories (all new), which are all essentially about a young man who’s just trying to find great stories and sell them to big New York magazines.

What is true? What isn’t? I know that sounds like a dreary exercise made for journalism ethics seminars, but there’s something subtly original in how he makes it work, and I’m sad that this book didn’t get a lot more attention when it came out.

Silverstein turns himself into a narrator, a “Jake Silverstein,” who is in his early 20s circa 1999 and, having given up on dreams of becoming a poet, moves to far West Texas to work at a small newspaper and learn to be a journalist. The eight chapters in Nothing Happened and Then It Did are evenly split (and labeled in the contents) as “fact” or “fiction,” and Sliverstein stitches them into a dreamy recollection of what it’s like to be a wannabe writer stuck way out in the middle of the nowhere. My favorite chapter is a fictional one, where the narrator accepts a job driving a famous photographer around the Midland/Odessa landscape that defined presidential candidate George W. Bush; the photographer (irritable, European) has to make one singular photo that will run with an campaign-related story in the New Yorker, which has already been reported and written by a Susan Orlean-like writer whom Silverstein envies from terribly afar.

And I especially admired the tight introduction, in which Silverstein recounts how the Spanish explorers — e.g., Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, circa 1530 — were so mesmerized (or intimidated, or mentally dislocated) by this landscape that they returned with fabricated accounts of what happened to them on their journeys through it. Silverstein writes:

Why did the friar lie? Historians have chewed on this for centuries. … “Since the rarefied atmosphere of the southwestern deserts is very deceptive,” explained a pair of New Mexico historians in 1928, “it may be that the pueblo appeared much larger than it really was.”

A long sojourn in the Southwest provides another explanation. It is unquestionably true that the desert is deceptive, but this may have more to do with its giant solitudes than its refractive atmospheric phenomena. To travel for hours over hundreds of of miles of treeless flatland without seeing a soul is to be forcefully reminded of your inherent aloneness in the world. … I can confirm that is not unusual, in such situations, for the curtain between the real and the imaginary to lift. …

Same goes for <<”Jake Silverstein,” who comes down with a case of gringo-style magical realism and inherent aloneness. He leaves the newspaper job in West Texas for New Orleans, then Mexico, then back to West Texas, always in a clunker Toyota: He is taken with the desolate world around him and half-motivated by a comically deluded sense of self. It’s Don Quixote, cub reporter, adrift on the highway.

There are stories about searching for Ambrose Bierce’s grave site, the grand opening of a McDonald’s in the Mexican interior, a hunt for doubloons in the Louisiana gulf islands and a cross-country road race in Mexico. It’s not trippy, hallucinogenic gonzo journalism stuff in the Hunter Thompson sense.  I’ve never met Silverstein, and now I want to, but my hunch is he may be only somewhat like the “Jake Silverstein” of this book — a castabout who is clearly not on his way to becoming the editor of Texas Monthly.

Halfway through, I no longer cared what was real and what wasn’t and stopped checking the table of contents for confirmation. Biography? Journalism? Coming-of-age novella? Nothing Happened and Then It Did is the first time I felt willing to throw away the carefully tended fences between fact and fiction. His prose isn’t highly stylized (it could be more so), and I skimmed through a couple of the “real” stories I’d already read in Harper’s, but Silverstein’s writing has great momentum. As it went along, I related to his loneliness and his drive (literally, miles and miles) to get a story he never gets. The better stories are the ones he makes up. By the end, as “Jake Silverstein” is deciding to give up journalism, I wanted to know the author a little better than he reveals. This recent Austin Chronicle profile helped with that.

• • •

Next, an example of a journalist doing rural Texas much more straightforwardly and therefore a bit more tediously: Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town, by Karen Valby.

Valby is a reporter for Entertainment Weekly. In 2006, in an uncharacteristic break from its wall-to-wall Harry Potter and Lost coverage, the magazine asked Valby to find a “town without pop culture,” or, at least, a town without the steady bitstream/shitstream of celebrity-logged pop culture that was quickly taking over American society in the mid-2000s.

Valby wound up in Utopia, Texas, which is up in the hill country near San Antonio. I sort of remember that story when it ran in EW; one of the great failings of Welcome to Utopia is that it doesn’t include the full, original article for us to see how this all began, which is the whole reason for the book. True to form, the townsfolk weren’t too pleased with what happened when a big-city magazine writer came to their town to write an arty-cull about them. Once again the great middle-of-America inferiority complex announces itself — we are so offended that you would take time out of your life to come write about ours, you good-for-nothing writer from somewhere else, you.

But Valby decided to return to Utopia (which I think translates to: she sold a book proposal based on the article) and sit among the Utopians for a longer spell. She’s determined to understand Utopia for reasons never quite known. The original premise (a town without pop-culture addictions) quickly dissolved with better phone coverage, Internet access and satellite TV. Without that, I didn’t ever sense what the real theme of Welcome to Utopia is. All books should be able to answer that question, in two parts:

A: What is This Book About? The answer to that should be a couple hundred words, very detailed, sort of like a slightly less advertorial version of the flap copy inside a book jacket and THEN …

B: What is This Book REALLY About? That answer needs to be one very short, very amazing sentence.

I don’t think Valby really gets a handle on part B of the question. Her discoveries aren’t profound, though she does respectfully portray her subjects, including the group of old men every small town has, who meet for coffee in the local convenience store at the crack of each dawn; a black teenage girl at the mostly white local high school; a mother whose sons have all gone to war; a restless teenage boy. Valby either transcribed a mountain of taped interviews and ride-alongs, or she’s extremely good at taking dialogue down in her notes. This is all a lot harder than it looks, and no matter what you end up writing, it will always be the tale of the outsider who visits the natives. I salute her determination to spend several months in Utopia and get to know those people on an intimate level.

But I could only admire that for so long. Welcome to Utopia can be moving, but it starts to drag as it fails to find or make a statement. An old-school editor would say it’s a very long feature story without a nutgraf; Augusten Burroughs compares it to To Kill a Mockingbird. (!!) I wonder if Valby was too worried about projecting a too-strong of point of view — which is my main criticism of so many works of nonfiction. I started skimming along in the last 100 pages, even as Utopia grapples with the idea of a black president. At the morning coffee group, the lone liberal in the bunch regretfully announces he’ll have to vote for McCain. He just can’t vote for a black man.

• • •

SIDE RANT: Like all books about or set in Texas, including my own, both Nothing Happened and Then It Did and Welcome to Utopia must work extra hard to seem “interesting” to people in, let’s just say, New York.

Notice how it never works in reverse; we non-New Yorkers are required to remain eternally interested in (and purchasers of) novels, memoirs and non-fiction books about: New York, Manhattan, a whole lot of Brooklyn; New York real estate, the New York immigrant experience way back when and right now, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Jews, and, less frequently, the rituals/customs/experiences of New York Catholicism, especially in the Italian and/or mafia sense; recollections and roman-a-clefs about East Coast college days followed by a move to New York; the New Yorker; New York media, the world in relation to New York; New York food, New York business, New York garbage, sewers, bridges, sex, marriage, divorce, children, politics, crime; New York history; What Would Happen if There Ceased to be New Yorkers on Manhattan island?, etc.

But don’t get me started on this. It’s a big bugaboo right now, and if I get going on it, we’ll be here all fucking night.

• • •

So much praise and <<bestseller glow (and now an Alan Ball/Oprah Winfrey/HBO movie deal) has been heaped on The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, that there’s little else I feel I can add or should hurt my fingers typing here. So, some general thoughts:

• It’s as good as the reviews say it is. It’s a scientific page-turner that is also a heart-wrenching family epic. And while it’s perfectly organized and manages a chronology that goes forward and backward, some of us in the One-Man Book Club wondered if the prose sometimes falters. Frankly, too much stylishness probably would have gotten in the way of the story, and the bestseller list would indicate that it hit the sweet spot between literary journalism and CSI.

Skloot made all the right choices, including the parts where she details her quest to get closer to Henrietta Lacks’s children and grandchildren. As much as anything, it’s a book about a determined reporter and a determined batch of cells.

• More than once, the story of the HeLa cells (and the woman who unwittingly donated them) made me think of batty Eileen Welsome and her unstoppable devotion to uncovering and telling the “Plutonium Experiment” stories when we were both working as reporters at the Albuquerque Tribune. Eileen spent, what, seven years or so on that story, plus another six or seven working on a book version. Skloot’s got her beat by a little — 21 years passed between the biology class where Skloot asked her first questions about the origin of HeLa cells and the publication of this book.

• Finally, my biggest overall thought was this: Waitaminnit. I was a terrible biology student, but I was surprised, about midway through The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, to realize the obvious: the HeLa cells are CANCER CELLS. They are the cells of the disease that killed Henrietta in 1951. They are part of her, as cancer insidiously took over her body on a cellular level, but they are not “her,” at least not the same way that her blood cells are.

And anyhow — all human genome mapping developments to the contrary — I don’t easily draw a line from my “cells” to the essential “me”-ness of me. You can clone me, but here I fall back on the philosopher Heraclitus talking about the same-foot-in-the-same-river thing. There is such a thing as a soul, or whatever you want to call it, and it eludes the Petri dish.

I was therefore sort of saddened by all the mythological thinking — the premise of this book — that orbits the origin story of the HeLa cells as the years go by: Her family thinks the cancer cells are their mother, almost in a Frankenstein sense, and who can blame them? But, in a way, the scientists also speak strangely (for scientists) about immortality here, of Henrietta’s ongoing contribution to science. They hand out awards to honor her and her family, mainly in order to minimize the fact that Johns Hopkins took Henrietta’s diseased cervical tissue without her permission and started reproducing the cells and selling them.

The scientists (and Skloot) seem all too willing to play metaphorical make-believe about a poor black woman who, in a way, posthumously travels all over the world, helps science cure diseases, and even takes a ride to outer space. (Also worrisome is how the HeLa cells, unchecked, contaminated other samples and possibly set cancer research back several years in the 1960s; it slightly negates the principal narrative of a book about HeLa’s contributions to science.)

Whether talking to researchers or to Henrietta’s daughter and sons (who struggled with the basic science), Skloot makes that thematic point over and over: Henrietta lives on. I don’t quite see it like that. A form of Henrietta’s cancer lives on. Or did I miss something?

• • •

Before I knock off for the night, let me get three books off the table that failed the One-Man Book Club’s FIFTY-PAGE TEST. That’s right — the books that failed to keep me going after page 50.

Never the fault of the book, of course. I rarely let a book into the house that didn’t interest me in some way — either from a review, or publicity (an NPR interview, e.g.), or an attractive jacket, or the recommendations of people I trust. So failing the Fifty Page Test is almost always the fault of the fickle, difficult One-Man Book Club…

<<The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. So sue me. Tried FOUR TIMES since 2007 to get into this novel and just can’t. But it’s so wondrous, you say, and it won a Pulitzer. Fine. But I need to move on.

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg. See my rant above about New Yorky books by New Yorky New York writers. This was wrongly touted (to me, anyhow) as a moving memoir about the ups and downs of the writing life. It’s actually a collection of short columns the author penned for the Times Literary Supplement. Redundant themes in p. 1-50: He didn’t get along with his tough, workaholic father. There’s nothing like New York. He’s just a man, a man making his way every day in the word-business of New York. Writing is a bitch but he can’t let her go.

Etc., etc. Zzzzzzz.

<<American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis. My thinking here was that, if I read Denizet-Lewis’s feature stories collected in once place, I would see something special about them that had eluded me when they ran in the New York Times Magazine. After a rather dry and perfunctory introductory essay, the stories all started to feel like homework and I checked out. This book is in every way the opposite of Nothing Happened and Then It Did, which for me has set the new gold standard for getting people to read one’s old magazine pieces.

The House of Tomorrow, by Peter Bognanni. It came highly recommended and I set it aside for a rainy Sunday when I was free and needed to jump into a good debut novel. This one is about a kid and his grandmother who live in a Bucky Fuller dome and museum. I didn’t get too far past p. 50. It was just going too slow for me; the characters were exhibiting a weirdness that seemed too much like fiction-class weirdness. It’s a real bummer when someone you admire and like insists you read a new, very good novel, and she even arranges to have it sent to you from the publisher; then I let down that trust and enthusiasm by not being able to get into it. Part of my deep guilt complex is feeling somehow responsible for that, which is crazytalk.

This is why we drink at the One-Man Book Club.

MORE TO COME THIS WEEK, if there’s time: Sarah Silverman’s THE BEDWETTER! Megan Daum’s LIFE WOULD BE PERFECT IF I LIVED IN THAT HOUSE! Gabrielle Zevin’s THE HOLE WE’RE IN! Daniel Clowes’s WILSON! William Powers’s HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY! And a 25th anniversary re-reading of LESS THAN ZERO!

Forgot to mention a very special guest who showed up at my Book People reading in Austin: Carl Anderson, PhD, a UT prof. If you live in Dallas, however, you know him as somebody else, starting about this time every year at NorthPark Mall.

Carl was in a purple tie-dye T-shirt on Saturday, but I’d recognize him anywhere. Here’s a picture of us at NorthPark back in 2006. He bought a copy of my book and said he was very interested in reading it. I hope he likes it, or I’m going to have a little too much coal.

If you’ve been reading this blog or if you know me even just a little, then you know that when it comes to memory and the past and driving around I can be a total sap. Fair warning, then. Move on or get in the passenger seat…

I lived in Austin for just a bit longer than three years — from 1996 to 1999, which was sort of like the roaring ’20s in that town, the decade everyone and everything became unbearably hip and people got rich just by being in the right action-figure-adorned cubicle farm internet start-up company at the exact right time. Being here this weekend really made it seem like forever ago.

Part of my nostalgia jag on this weekend was triggered by how much Austin has changed in terms of infrastructure (freeways, roads) and architecture (Christ, how many loft condos does a city need?). The pic above is one of those utopian developer photoshoppy-jobbies — but it’s pretty close to a fully realized vision. The smell of progress is also evident in the palpably increased density of restaurants, boutiques, and other places to spend money and pack on the fat grams. No city in America is better served by outdoor-seating-under-strings-of-Italian-wedding-lights opportunities. Austin may well be the most delicious city I’ve ever left behind (although Albuquerque puts up a pretty good fight).

More than one Austinite I encountered this weekend bemoaned what the city has become — the growth, the pace, the conspicuous consumption — but that’s always been a chief activity in Austin: complaining that it was so much better back in [fill in idyllic year here]. But I think Austin looks and feels better now, somehow. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and what I experienced this weekend felt like Austin Plus-Plus.

The basic quality of the place (happily dumpy, rusty, and stoney in more than one sense) is still intact, and so is the boundless civic pride. People have always loved living here; although it’s famous for being “laid back,” life in Austin requires of its people the most competitive style of laid-backitude. People hurl themselves into the weekend with gusto, determined to out-Austin one another: they are jogging around Town Lady Bird Lake early in the day; they are lined up for just the right breakfast tacos and brunch hot spots by 10; they are tailgating in deluxe style by noon before the UT game; they are in and out of all the right bars and night spots and arrive at favorite eateries with the reverence of hipster pilgrims. And they’re still record shopping, which gladdens me.

They’re also still voracious readers. Hooray! I read from and signed copies of Tinsel on Saturday afternoon at Book People, the lit’rature palace on West 6th and Lamar. I can only begin to guess how many hours I spent in this store back in the ’90s, fully absorbed in magazines and books. (More on that — my happily delusional, late-20s, literary life of letters back then — in a moment.)

Around 20-30 people showed up. Many of them were friends, including former colleagues from the Austin American-Statesman. Some were stray customers. More than a few were curious about the book, lured there by one hell of an article about by Patrick Beach, which ran in the Statesman on Saturday morning. More on that, too, in a moment — but here’s a snippet:

We have been here before, sort of but not really: Big-city journalist parachutes into Anywhere, USA, observes the curious folkways and mores of People Not Like Himself, writes a piece posing as fish out of water with tone of bemused detachment, which aims to fumigate persistent aroma of condescension toward his subjects.

Except this is my friend Hank Stuever, a prince of a guy, former American-Statesman writer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, brutally funny, warm and generous and a better writer than I could ever hope to be. I hate him.

Let us dispense with the notion of journalistic impartiality and the use of surnames on second reference and call the man whose talent I’m murderously jealous of “Hank.” And let’s talk about Hank’s new book, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” which is about three Christmases — and three households — in the Dallas exburb of Frisco from 2006 to 2008. It’s also about consumerism, an economy that conveniently imploded and red-state Americans who go to churches where they’re told “God wants you to feel good about your boobs.”

You will definitely laugh; you will probably learn; you might get angry. The scope is huge. It’s about, like, EVERYTHING.

And it just gets better. Go read it, unless you are sicker of me than I am of myself. Pat came to the reading with his sons, Adam and Joe, and like Austin, they’re all grows up! (This has been a distinct theme of the trip so far — people keep coming to my readings accompanied by tweens, teenagers, and college students whom I remember as babies.)

Of the rest of the people at the reading was a friend with whom I once sang a duet in a high school musical; another was Helen Johnson, who I profiled in 1996, and remains such a dear friend, though we don’t hear from one another as much as we mean to. The endlessly smart and entertaining Spike Gillespie was there, which is all the approval I’ll ever need. I had a happy time doing the reading, and signed as much stock as I could.

I got to have dinner with Michelle Breyer, my Austin touchstone, now the super successful goddess of coiled locks at naturallycurly.com; Michelle is yet another person blissfully aglow with newspaperdom’s afterlife. I got to see Marques Harper and his friends at a bar on 4th Street (eek — flashbacks to Oilcan Harry’s, etc.) on Friday night, at which Marques reminded me just how bad the gay dating scene can be in this otherwise enlightened town. I got to have breakfast with Pat Beach at a relocated El Sol y La Luna.

I got to spend a few hours Sunday with Spike, who showed me quilts at the history museum, bought me lunch at Kerbey Lane and then showed me what became of the old Mueller Airport land. (The abandoned control tower is still standing, amid a cookie-cutter subdivision, and it is a wondrously spooky sight. I wonder if they still affix a NOEL sign to it during holidays? Doesn’t look like they do.)

Also? I got to drive around a lot Austin, by myself, which I hadn’t done in, gosh, 10 years. This got me in one of my moods — not sad or anything, just reflective. (Self-reflective, of course.)

What was I here?

All I could think of was how much I worked. I kept wondering about the stories: Is Stevie Ray Vaughan’s stuff still in that storage unit on South Congress, and does the check still arrive each month to cover the rent? What happened to John Guerin after he sold his Guitar Heaven store in Georgetown, and did Denny keep the oft-traded Fender acoustic forever, like he said he would? Is the roller rink off 183 and Burnet still open and do they still do adult-only skate on Tuesdays? How are the Worthingtons, the northwest Austin suburbanites I profiled? Do the old men still meet every morning in the Lockhart Dairy Queen? Is that used office equipment still in the Quonset hut east of I-35, and if so, what did it look like during this Great Recession? How’s the funeral business treating Robert Falcon these days?

I don’t actually need answers to all those questions. (And, in a happy coincidence, Lupe and Sonny Falcon saw the Statesman article, called me at the front desk at Book People, and I went over and saw them on Sunday afternoon. If you’ve read “All Faiths” in Off Ramp, the story about the discount funeral home I wrote in 1999, you know who I’m talking about. The actual All Faiths strip-mall funeral home is still on South Congress and St. Elmo, but Robert left it behind years ago and moved on; he’s now running two funeral homes in Amarillo.)

So there’s that kind of nostalgia. But also I was thinking about my former world here. I had great friends back then (many now moved away), but I was also terribly lonely sometimes. I spent a crazy amount of time reading. On Saturday morning, I walked into the Little City cafe on Congress (shabby now) just to look around for a minute recall that young(er) man who spent so much time sitting there, deep into his books and magazines, or marking up his own story drafts with a red pen. (When I was feeling flush with cash, which was maybe once every six weeks, I would shift the locale to the bar at the Four Seasons.) You could not have convinced that Hank Stuever that he’d be back in Book People reading from his own book in 10 years.

Austin is like some kind of fever dream I once had. In 1996 and ‘97, I got so down that I had to see a therapist, who had me try a variety of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, but I don’t think I was on them long enough to tell the difference, and pretty soon it was the work (and people) who lifted me out of that dark funk. What I did love was Ambien (I took one Ambien a night for almost three years — nearly my entire Austin tenure) and I wonder if this is why Austin has such a dreamy, gauzy quality in my mind.

That story Pat Beach wrote really touched me. He was under no obligation whatsoever to do such a thing, or do it with the care and thought that he did. Over breakfast Sunday morning, Pat and I caught up. When we sat two cubicles apart in the Statesman’s features department, we used to really pay attention to what the other was working on. All of us feature writers did — we had good editors and the gang of us (Kallenberg, McLeese, Garcia, Corky, Hibberd, Barnes, others) were in the same essential hunt. It was collegial and competitive; our bosses wanted it that way. We cared about that most ephemeral thing: writing feature stories.

Now here’s Pat and me talking about it over huevos and tacos like prematurely old men. I so admire Pat for sticking with it — and sticking with it in Austin, when he could have moved to a lot of other papers, when things were still ripping along. Here, in 2009, he’s one of two (two!) full-time feature section writers who have a general assignment beat. I want him to keep hitting it hard.

It’s Monday morning now. I’m packed, checked out of the hotel, and having breakfast at Magnolia Cafe and reading the Statesman, which, I have to say, given the givens, looks and reads like a paper in relatively sturdy shape. I’m still worried about the fate of feature writing, not just here but everywhere, but a piece on the Statesman’s front page Sunday by Kevin Robbins, about one of the survivors of the Aggie bonfire collapse (there’s that 10-years-ago thing, again) made me think all this fretting is hooey. It’s good.

Gregory Kallenberg, if you were here with me at Magnolia, there’d be extra jalepenos in a little plastic cup, and yes, we could do an entree split.

I’m off to Houston for a reading at Brazos Books tonight. The fact that my rental car (a black Ford Escape; apologies to polar ice caps) has an iPod jack only sweetens the deal. Yes, I went to Waterloo Records, but once again the Internet ruins everything it touches: Instead of buying a heap of CDs and a couple of LPs, I simply wandered the store for an hour and made mental notes about what to go get from iTunes.