Entertainment Weekly, July 23, 2004 ("Editor's Choice")
Chandra Levy, self-storage facilities, Star Wars fanatics, and water-bed saleswomen receive equally lovely treatment from Washington Post writer Stuever's razor-sharp eye. Rightly calling himself "a man who thinks too much and too sadly about that which is faddish and gone," Stuever homes in on the banal but still-beating heart of Americana from stints in Albuquerque, Austin, and D.C. "Xanadu Tuesdays" gives roller disco aficionados a wistful shout- out; "All Faiths" considers the competitive verve of a Texas funeral director; and "Notes on Kamp" (slyly aping the title of Susan Sontag's landmark 1964 treatise) takes readers into the nether regions of a KOA Kamp-ground. Stuever writes in a warm, knowing tone well-suited to his low-key subjects, and because he misses nothing, these meaningful stories offer a master class in top-notch journalism (Entertainment Weekly grade: A) --Nicholas Fonseca

The Brooklyn Rail: "On the Road," January 2005, By Michael Rose

Hank Stuever likes the letter k.

"Our country is sometimes a kountry, built entirely upon particleboard," he writes in the preface to his book, Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere. "It has kastles, kampgrounds, komfort."

Stuever has spent his relatively short career in journalism setting off to find this kountry, and a selection of his writings are collected in Off Ramp. This is where we can read about people who spend their free time dressing up as Star Wars storm troopers, the cultural significance of plastic chairs, and a guy who makes a living as a "sofa surgeon," cutting up people's furniture to fit it up stairs and through doors. It's where we get a glimpse into the place that Stuever calls Elsewhere, which is not a city center but not quite suburban idyllic. Elsewhere is where Stuever finds his material: among the fast food places along the interstate, at the self-storage lockers, at the roller rink, at the old, abandoned shopping mall. These are the places where Stuever finds insights into our lives as a society. His writing is unlike that of any other reporter working today, and the book should be read by anyone who thinks that America is doomed to a middling, artificial, deep-fried existence.

It would be easy to accuse Stuever of condescension or mockery, but he isn't just a member of the Liberal Media Elite. Sure, Stuever may be an openly gay writer for the Washington Post, but he was born and raised in Oklahoma City. He knows what it's like not only in the middle of the country but in Elsewhere. He's spent time there, and the truths that he illuminates in his work speak to everyone.

Stuever is able to pick out cultural phenomena and put his finger on what makes each of them important. Who among us has really thought long and hard about those ubiquitous stackable plastic patio chairs? But after reading Stuever's essay about them, you recall that familiar sensation of skin peeling away from plastic in the summer heat, and those times you've spent sitting in backyards, listening to people you don't know very well talk about other people you don't know at all. Stuever remembers both of these experiences in his essay and draws some conclusions about the chairs themselves.

"There's something about the plastic patio chair," Stuever writes. "No, there's not. And that's what it is about them." He goes on to say that "the resin stacking patio chair is the Tupperware container of a lard-assed universe." Such pithy summaries of our cultural landscape and unconventional descriptions are Stuever's trademark: He describes the owner of a self-storage facility as "a small and soft woman with amber-colored hair who once ran a day-care center, who looks like your aunt, who looks like she would bring you a casserole." You can see the woman in your mind and almost hear her voice. With Stuever's descriptions, we feel like we're exploring the Elsewhere right along with him.

Even in Stuever's lighter stories (the sofa surgeon, two neighbors on Trading Spaces, the Kampground of America), he touches on things that aren't so light. The sofa story is really about adapting to living with a partner and starting a family. The story about Trading Spaces is about how friendship is defined in a suburb where all the houses look alike. The kampground story is really about traveling on the open road and how people connect on their journeys. Some pieces are more forthrightly dark; after all, there's heartache right there in the title. The last section of Off Ramp is devoted to essays on 9/11, the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy (seemingly superficial in the wake of what's happened since, but haunting nonetheless), the D.C. area sniper, Texans combing for wreckage from the space shuttle Columbia, and the Oklahoma City bombing, to which Stuever brings a heartfelt personal voice. Granted, plenty has been written about these events already, but never from Stuever's point of view. He sees what's hidden beneath and draws his conclusions from what he finds.

Stuever tells us in his preface about some Dutch travelers who approached him while he was "kamping" at the KOA. They asked:

"We are from the Netherlands, and we are for two days wonderink who it is you are, and why you are all the time with cameras and writing down things?"

Stuever says that their question perfectly summarized what he was trying to find out: Who it is you are. Through the essays in Off Ramp, he takes a stab at finding out. Not only who he is, or who his subjects are, but who we all are.

Washingtonian Magazine online: December 2004

What's not to love about a sentence like this?

"Along the nail-saloniest, carpet-warehousiest, noodle-bowliest, car-stereo-installationiest part of good, old Route 1—the slowest possible route between D.C. and Baltimore, where ambulances scream up constantly along its beaten path of pawnshops and liquor stores and funeral homes—the people still understand waterbeds, and Rose Taylor still understands the people."

That's the opening of Washington Post Style writer Hank Stuever's story about "waterbed people" and those—in College Park, in this case—who keep them supplied.

In Akron, Ohio, we meet the bowling people, whose association is located "in a low, boxy, 1960s optometrist-esque building on a quiet commercial strip along the broad waistband of the nation's Sansabelt . . . ."

These "elsewheres," as he calls them, are Stuever's specialty. Few write about them as observantly, sharply (in all senses of the word), and, in a strange way, lovingly as he does.

Stuever is an Oklahoma City native who has written for papers in Albuquerque and Austin—examples of that work, sometimes updated, are mixed here with his Post writing. He's interested in fading markers of the past (roller-skating rinks, Josie and the Pussycats), subcultures many of us only drive by (Kampgrounds of America, credit-card monolith Wilmington, Delaware), public obsessions (Trading Spaces, the California election recall), how we process tragedy (September 11, the Washington sniper attacks).

At times, he steps into the proceedings himself—he's well aware of his inability to keep at bay the reporter's "dreaded vertical pronoun: I." Despite his protests, those instances don't come off as intrusions but often lend a subtle poignancy, as in the memory of twentysomething debt that informs the Wilmington article.

Most often, it's not the pronoun "I" that drives the writing but its doppelgänger, the "eye." That's what prevents these rigorously reported feature stories from being mistaken for anyone else's.

The last piece, "Unassigned Lands," about the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, is the closest thing to a personal essay in the book. Stuever goes back to his hometown, talking to friends, his grandfather, his high-school principal—as much searching for a part of himself as giving others voice. In the end he acknowledges, "I have not been the reporter I wanted to be here. I have avoided the funerals. I didn't dicker for a press badge to get closer to the mammoth, ruinous thing. When it comes down to it, I didn't hear the boom, and for that, I am hardly Oklahoman anymore . . . ."

What starts out as a journey home ends as a letting-go. I won't give away the last line, but it's haunting, true, and proof that this is more than a repackaged collection of articles. They form a coherent, often funny, even lovely rendering of one man's curious embrace of the world.—William O'Sullivan

The Palm Beach Post: "Key to Our Culture? Roller Skates," Oct. 10, 2004, By Rachel Sauer

If you believe Hank Stuever, salvation can be found in a strip mall.

Believe that, and you'll believe a certain path to Nirvana involves rollerskates. And that a version of heaven is a summer night, a park and guys playing used guitars. Believe Stuever, and you'll believe in white plastic patio chairs, Wonder Woman, overblown weddings, cheap funerals, Star Wars and suburban sprawl - the whole fabulous, mundane mess that makes us, well, us. And, at the risk of sounding like the obsessed fan I am, I believe Hank Stuever. I believe that the little, meaningless things we do every day say the most about who we are, that the cast-off detritus of our lives paints as clear a picture of our culture as handprints on a cave wall.

I believe that managers of storage facilities are more interesting than movie stars. I believe New York and L.A. are in no way superior to the flyover zone. I believe most people will tell you stuff if you sit still, shut up and listen, and care. Which Stuever obviously does.

So I loved his book, Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere. It's a collection of stories he wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune, Austin American-Statesman and Washington Post, his current gig.

He breaks just about every rule they teach in journalism school. He injects his own experience into stories. He's interested in topics Serious Journalists scorn, yet he's a Serious Journalist, too. His stories are seriously reported and insightful. They just happen to be about sofas that won't fit up the stairwell. Stuever has the rare ability to see the smallest details of daily experience that somehow project into the Big Picture. For example, he writes:

On Michael Jackson: "We want to know about his babies the way we want to know where our own kid found a piece of candy on the playground: What's that? Where did you get it? Who gave it to you? Give it to me."

On skating at Playland in Austin, Texas: "Here is a place where, when you walk up and pay your $5 at the window and David Dodson buzzes you into that damp, breezy darkness, when you take in the acetate flashes of color, and hear, oh, let's say, not for nostalgia's sake, Rose Royce's anthemic Car Wash, here is a place where, when all of that has occurred, something clicks in you and the world no longer exists, except this forgotten world."

On living alone: "Woe to the solo: Wicked queens live alone in castles, waiting to eat children. Pedophiles, Unabombers, civics teachers, the fat and unloved. But these are cheap jokes. Living alone is also a joy . . ."

In an American-Statesman story that isn't included in the book, he explained why he does what he does: "I drive around sometimes and try to extrapolate meaning from places where there may be none, inspired by such complicated questions as: What do all these Peeing Calvin windshield decals mean to the world?

"It takes me places I'd sooner not be. For example, cruising parking lots of Wal-Marts or mega-grocery stores or Tejano nightclubs, looking for people who have the decal on their trucks. In other words, because."

Stuever reveals us as flawed, nostalgic, silly, paranoid and kind.

Believe him or not, but he's right about the white plastic patio chairs.

Solares Hill (Key West, Fla.), Sept. 3, 2004, Review by Nancy Klingener I have never been a fan of parachute journalism. This is the type of reporting that requires a journalist to drop in on a place they've never been, often a place that is experiencing some traumatic or unusual event (in our case, think hurricanes, or chickens) and report back to the world as if they're an authority on the place, its history and the character of the local populace. Far too often, the stories produced by parachute journalism are condescending or stupid or just plain wrong.

It's an extraordinary pleasure, then, to come across journalism that manages to transcend the cliches and conventions of this type of reporting and send back dispatches from different parts of the country about different kinds of people. There aren't many writers out there who can pull this off: Calvin Trillin and Ian Frazier are two that I have admired for some time. After reading this book, I am adding Hank Stuever to this list.

Stuever's work is even more impressive because he writes for newspapers—currently The Washington Post and before that, the Austin American-Statesman and the Albuquerque Tribune. Any story written for the daily rush of a newspaper that can stand up to time and hardcovers is an achievement. Stuever has two dozen of them here.

It could be I'm partial to Stuever because we come from the same generation and share some cultural obsessions (Star Wars, Josie and the Pussycats, though I think his Wonder Woman thing is stronger than mine). It's great to see Generation X coming of a literary age, especially in non-fiction.

Some of his one-sentence descriptions are brilliant—Akron, Ohio, lies on "the broad waistband of the nation's Sansabelt." Wilmington, Del., home of all those giant credit card companies, is in "the great middle grade of eastern seaboard dullness."

He also captures some quote that will ring my head for awhile, like Miss Virginia, arguing for holding the Miss America a few days after Sept. 11, 2001: "Frankly, what the terrorists want to do is put a kink in our social lives. Out of respect for the dead, we should carry on." A woman in the Space Center Souvenirs shop after the Columbia shuttle disaster: "I just finished my Sept. 11 memory book and here it is something else already. You can't keep up." Stuever is clearly an aficionado of the absurd and surreal in American life.

And Stuever is also a fan of the underdog, of the uncelebrated but all-too representative cultural traits that define us as a nation. The title of the book comes from Stuever's fondness for the great national Elsewhere, also known as Generica, which doesn't even exist in the worlds of the New York Times Sunday Styles section or glossy shelter magazines. As Stuever knows, that's where most of us actually live, and he loves those places.

He is incisive in analyzing our cultural obsessions, using prisms like a "Trading Spaces" episode from the suburban nonpareil of Plano, Texas: " ‘Trading Spaces' confirms that real estate is the new sex. It is Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Medium-Density Fiberboard."

In the years-long run-up to the release of the first Star Wars prequel, Stuever posts a request on a website for people to tell him about their prequel dreams, then consults a Jungian therapist on their meaning. He talks to the original artist who created Josie and the Pussycats, and meets the original Josie, the artist's wife.

Stuever's basic approach to journalism may be best summed up in his piece on Kmart, written after the giant chain declared bankruptcy: "Something's always a little wrong in a Kmart, which is as good a reason as any to love it." Later he describes a typical Kmart as "a store pulled in so many directions that chaos almost always threatens to take over. It is messy, noisy, understandably and admirably human."

We already know way too much about certain places and certain places in America today. Why read one more story about the Hamptons or Hollywood, about Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lopez or Lance Armstrong? Read this book instead.

New Orleans Times-Picayune: Armchair travel // "Books to Go By," Sept. 26, 2004 If the opening lines of this book don't suck you in, well . . what can I say. Steuver, a staff writer for the saucy Washington Post Style section, begins: "Our country is sometimes a kountry, spelled with a k, built entirely upon particleboard. It has kastles, kampgrounds, komfort." He writes that he began wondering about life off the turnpikes, and eventually made "Elsewhere" his reporting beat. So forget about reading about the monuments and museums in Washington, and read about Stuever's dilemmas and complexes, about going to strip malls and skating rinks. He's sort of a warped Charles Kuralt on the road to the heart of what may be the "real" United States, not the one we like to think we live in, the one with idyllic back roads. No Stuever writes about people we may avoid in the mall, about funeral parlors. His public relations people compare his writing to a mixture of "Joan Didion (serious), Augusten Burroughs (who? He has 14,800 entries on Google, and is described as "one of our top satirists and memoirists," winning praise for his "Running with Scissors") and David Sedaris" (subtly hilarious). Whatever. Stuever is worth reading.--Millie Ball

San Antonio Express-News: "Chatty stories have solid foundations," Aug. 8, 2004
By Deborah Martin
About 10 years ago, reporter Hank Stuever did a story about Kampgrounds of America.

He built the piece, which includes a few urban legends and KOA history, around a few days and nights he spent hanging out at a site in Albuquerque. While he was there, he was approached by a curious foreign tourist, who asked him, "We are for two days wonderink who it is you are, and why you are all the time with cameras and writing down things?"

Well, it's what he does. And he's very good at it.

"Off Ramp" collects some of his strongest work from stints at the Albuquerque Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman, as well as from his current gig writing for the Washington Post's Style section.

Newspaper readers who haven't run across his stuff before have been missing out. He's a terrific writer, and "Off Ramp" is a treat to read.

The book includes feature stories on such disparate topics as those seemingly mundane plastic chairs that pop up at cookouts; the creator of "Josie and the Pussycats"; the impact of 9/11 on the Miss America pageant; and the life and times of a discount mortician in Austin.

Most of the pieces have a breezy, chatty tone that comes partly from Stuever's willingness to weave parts of his own experiences into his work. That approach can be tiresome, but Stuever is savvy enough to know just how much to rely on that technique.

There's more to his work than simply musing out loud on whatever strikes his fancy. Stuever is a solid reporter, and his work is built on sturdy journalism.

That's not what sets him apart. The best elements of these stories are smart, sometimes surprising pop culture references and his keen-eyed observations of contemporary life.

Here he is describing California during the 2003 gubernatorial recall election: "California was behaving like a celebrity gone off her meds, broke and bipolar, babbling incoherently into an invisible phone, toothless and trespassing and asking for help. Orange jumpsuit, darkened roots, dumped by both her agent and her publicist."

And on Kmart, in a piece about the difference between that financially troubled chain and Target and Wal-Mart: "The thing to love about Kmart is that a small child is always about to knock over all of the ironing boards, in a great commotion of noise, followed by a spanking, the kind of spanking you didn't think got delivered in America anymore (because you've spent too much time in Target, and not enough time in Kmart)."

The final section of the book shifts into darker areas than most of the rest of it. The stories deal with the sniper attacks that terrorized Virginia in 2002, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Each is thoughtful and well-written, and every bit as good a read as the rest of the book.

Deborah Martin is the assistant arts & entertainment editor at the Express-News.

Cargo Magazine, July/August 2004
"Reporter Stuever--the best reason to read the Washington Post--writes hilarious short stories about cultural touchstones like Trading Spaces and Kmart."

Metro Weekly (Washington, DC): "On Target: Hank Stuever's 'Off Ramp' is a trip worth taking," July 29, 2004 By Sean Bugg For a profession that's all about telling stories with words, newspaper writing can be an awfully dull business when it comes to reading it. Sure, the facts can be interesting and important in and of themselves, but it's too rare to find the journalist who can make the words the sentences as vibrant as the subjects they highlight. While no one expects a report on, say, local zoning board meetings to fill the page with playful puns and delightful metaphors (though lord knows some have tried), when it comes to reporting the truth at the heart of less newsy news, the words have to live up to the subject at hand. Washington Post Style writer Hank Stuever has built a reputation for just that talent as he chronicles the lives (and sometimes deaths) of the famous, infamous and everyday people of D.C. and the nation. His new book, Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere, collects some of his best work at the Post, as well as from his stints as a reporter in Albuquerque, N.M., and Austin, Tex.

Off Ramp is a compilation of stories from what Stuever calls his beat: "It started out as a private list I taped next to my computer, in my newsroom cubicle, for several years: I put 'false cities' on my beat, which meant airports, the Best Buy, bland buildings. I put 'things kept in shoeboxes in spare closets' on my beat. I claimed 'teenagers who don't help out the community' for my own. " On the surface, it sounds dangerously over-precious -- the kind of thing a young journalist with too many Cure concert t-shirts might outline as a meaningful career. But Stuever delivers on the promise with insightful and arresting portraits of Americans too few people ever see. While Stuever's writings on his own life as a gay man will grab the interest of many "family " fans -- his piece "Wonder Woman's Powers" strikes chords with every gay man of a certain age who ever twirled and twirled and twirled with images of bracelets and golden lassos in their heads -- the standout parts of Off Ramp are those that range far afield from the world of gay. "Modern Bride " traces the path of a Hispanic family in Albuquerque as they plan and implement a wedding. In the process it covers everything from love story to family history to socio-economic primer -- without delving into the world of sledgehammer preachiness. In "All Faiths," the story of a low-cost funeral home business in Austin, Stuever neatly balances the macabre humor with a respect for the dignity of his subjects that's all too lacking in the overly-ironic work of other self-described chroniclers of American by-ways. Simply put, Off Ramp is a trip worth taking.

Seattle Weekly: BOOKS, July 28, 2004 A journalist recounting his fieldwork in Kerouacian form is nothing new. And it seems even older still after Hunter S. Thompson. But unlike Thompson and his trunk full of psychedelic escapism, Washington Post staff writer Hank Stuever soberly and humbly embraced his bleak early beats, identifying in an almost familial way with what he terms "the American elsewhere." In this collection of 26 pieces previously published in the Post, Albuquerque Tribune, and Austin American-Statesman, Stuever presents himself as a champion of the underdog, the has-been, the sweet and low-down. He professes empathy and kinship with floundering former child stars, family-owned discount funeral parlors, and the regulars at Kampground of America. He relates the sad fate of Dan DeCarlo, the originator of Josie and the Pussy Cats, who drew inspiration from sketches he made on love letters to his wife. Later, DeCarlo was fired by Archie Comics for claiming rights to the icons. Given such seemingly lackluster assignments, Stuever adopts a hyper- conscious, soulful stance regarding society's underappreciated nooks. His essays often give surprising depth and richness to the anonymous unknowns. At his best, Stuever provides a bittersweet, unique perspective on the places you've looked at but never seen, and the people you've talked to but who eventually blurred with other forgotten faces. His last cluster of more recent stories feels out of place, though. The book becomes less about the intriguing, overlooked corners of society and more about Stuever's rising journalistic status. He addresses tragedies like Sept. 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, which are hardly part of his American elsewhere. And by the end of Off Ramp, Stuever is hardly a humble journalistic nobody, which tips the book off balance. That he describes his precious elsewhere with such insightful eloquence also proves that he's moved beyond it.-Emily Page

The Stranger: "The Newsman Who Told No News," July 28, 2004
By Eli Sanders
When I was just out of college and among the crop of interns at one of Seattle's daily newspapers, we young reporters used to talk about Hank Stuever the way prisoners talk about the guy who has escaped over the wall. Here we were, spending our early 20s doing the journalistic equivalent of stamping license plates--the briefs about car crashes, the announcements of state lotto jackpot winners--and there was Stuever, not much older than most of us, sitting at the Washington Post writing beautiful, lengthy epics about subjects our editors would hardly have considered noteworthy. In one celebrated instance, he produced a 2,500-word opus concerning nothing more unusual than a couple trying to move their too-big couch up a tiny set of stairs.

That piece, "The Couch That Warped Space-Time," was, to our minds, a trick on par with that performed by the "sofa surgeon" who appears in Stuever's story to rescue the frustrated couple. (The sofa surgeon disassembles their Hecht's Special, a couch that is "cream-colored and modular and ultimately unremarkable," and thereby gets it up the tiny stairs.) In writing about this, Stuever takes a domestic occurrence so banal that it might as well have been colored cream--small stairs, large couch, ho-hum--and dissects it until he finds within it an irresistible narrative about the size of the universe, the stubbornness of love, and the hopes contained in objects. Then, for his final trick, he manages to get the story into the long gray columns of a serious daily newspaper.

Fittingly, the couch story opens Off Ramp, a new collection of Stuever's newspaper writing, and the fact that this writing has been bound between hardcovers (most newspaper writing, after all, is thrown away) should tell you something about the quality of Stuever's work. (That he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer should tell you something, too.) Newsrooms, it may surprise no one to hear, are filled with people who wish they were creating something more lasting than the day's news, people who say, late at night over beers, that they would rather be real writers. Failing that, these types of reporters hope at least to one day be as funny in print as Stuever is allowed to be, or to write sentences such as this: "My great-grandfather, Joseph Jacob Schneider, is fixing windmill blades on the family's western Oklahoma wheat farm on a November day in 1922 when, somehow, he loses his grip, falls, breaks his neck, and dies."

This is a short story. This is a memoir. This is a historical biography. Actually, it's Stuever's tenderly detailed and moving newspaper account, republished and expanded in Off Ramp, of the aftermath of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, his hometown. Like Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood showed that the factual reporting of a murder and its aftermath could, in the right hands, become something much more expansive, Stuever's writing elevates (and reinvigorates) the journalistic form. But unlike Capote, Stuever decided long ago to take as his subjects not the typical newspaper fodder, such as a murder and its aftermath, but rather "stories that contained almost no important news" and, preferably, were set in the unphotogenic places and moments he refers to as the American "Elsewhere": storage units, Kmart, bland buildings, campgrounds spelled with a K, nine-ish in the morning.

"Let's say you're dead" is the first sentence of Stuever's 3,500-word piece on a strip-mall funeral parlor, and re-reading this sentence in Off Ramp one thinks that he might as well be talking to the newspaper industry, where slipping circulation figures and an aging readership have led to warnings that the dailies should start envisioning their own, swift demise. Desperate to attract younger readers, many newspapers, including the one where Stuever works, are now putting out free, dumbed-down versions of themselves, tabloids with snappy names such as Thrive and Quick and, in the Post's case, Express. Who knows if these newspaper knockoffs will stop the death spiral, but in creating them the newspaper industry is certainly giving rise to exactly the type of depressing, desperate, slightly funny, and very American phenomenon that Stuever loves to write about. In other words, while he has been looking Elsewhere, his medium has begun to appear much like his favorite subject.

Albuquerque Journal: "Reporter observes life in 'Off Ramp' stories," July 25, 2004
By Leanne Potts It's been said that Hank Stuever, a staff writer at the Washington Post, is the Jerry Seinfeld of newspapering, a hilarious practitioner of journalism about nothing.

The comparison is intended as a compliment, but it couldn't be further from the truth. Stuever writes about the most important things of all -- the yearning, the dreams, the frailty and the fear that make up the human psyche in early 21st-century America. Stuever's gift is that he can spot epiphanic emotional truths in the most prosaic of places -- a waterbed shop in suburban Maryland, a self-storage facility in Texas, a plastic patio chair in Anywhere, U.S.A.

That he is able to make you laugh about it all is just icing on the writerly cake.

"Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere" is a compilation of articles Stuever wrote in the last 12 years for the Post, the Austin American-Statesman and The Albuquerque Tribune.

There are 26 pieces in all, and two of the meatiest were done during his five-year stint at the Tribune in the early 1990s (where he was a colleague of mine).

In one, Stuever chronicled an Albuquerque couple's yearlong journey from engagement to wedding. In the other, he returned to his hometown of Oklahoma City to write about the effect the deadly 1995 bombing of the federal Murrah Building had on the city.

Both were finalists for a Pulitzer, and the wedding piece brought down a hailstorm of controversy locally over its depiction of Hispanics when it was published in 1992.

Other pieces in the book are more lighthearted, but no less well- observed, like the one about "Survivor" winner Richard Hatch: "... in his twisted way, Richard did more for gays than a thousand Wills, with their attendant Graces, could ever do. He proved what the military and the Boy Scouts of America must on some level have always dreaded, and it is this: The power of one determined gay guy -- the archetypal Evil Queen -- could collapse a nation."

Some may want to compare Stuever to David Sedaris, because Stuever's writing has the same feel of a candid chat with a knowing and very funny pal who makes you feel smarter and hipper just by association.

But Stuever is far better at recording the telling and factual details of a situation. He's a reporter, not an essayist. He also has far more compassion for his subjects than Sedaris, who tends to be condescending even when he's being self-deprecating.

In a piece about a pair of Texas women who appear on the home- makeover show "Trading Places," Stuever is squarely on the side of the suburban housewife who stops the "strong-willed, Prada-sandaled designer from Atlanta" from dying her friend's carpet bright orange. At the same time he gently ridicules the Texas women's matching hairstyles -- "the agreed-upon hairstyle of much of the rest of Mrs. America."

An affection for humanity, even when we're at our tackiest, shines in the most acerbic of Stuever's writing. It's a feat that takes a rare mix of intelligence and heart.

You get the sense Stuever believes that somehow -- despite our penchant for KOAs, Doritos and tract houses -- it will all work out.

The Oregonian: "Intimate Look at 'Ordinary' American Life is Fascinating," July 25, 2004
By Barry Johnson
After reading a couple of randomly selected chapters in Hank Stuever's "Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere," you may wonder: Did these all appear in the newspaper? These strange, funny, personal tales that seem too dense, too speculative for "normal" newspapering?

Yes, they did: The Albuquerque Tribune, the Austin American- Statesman and The Washington Post. Two of them were Pulitzer Prize finalists in feature writing. If the gods were just (they aren't), they would just go ahead and name the feature writing prize after Stuever. He's that good.

His subject, "the American Elsewhere" in his formulation, is that great, ordinary run of life in the United States, the part we consider too boring to put on the cover of Newsweek or feature in a network sitcom or even put on the front page of the daily paper. Except it's not ordinary or boring at all, at least once Stuever has parked his car in its strip malls and started talking to the people he finds there. It's not boring for a second, not for a sentence.

Where does Stuever go? A massive Mexican American wedding that threatens to spin entirely out of control, an independent funeral home that provides a good funeral at a cheap price, a Kampground of America off the interstate, a roller rink where adult disco night has taken off against the odds. Along the way he teaches us the history of Wonder Woman, how to move a couch, how to parse the difference between Kmart and Target and Wal-Mart.

The characters are fascinating, everywhere he turns. Rose has ridden out the waterbed boom and bust at her shop in a haunted house between Baltimore and D.C. Sonny was the Fajita King until his last restaurant closed and he went to work for his son, the undertaker. Debbie Billington had the presence of mind and steely character to handle an outraged Honey Bear, whose stuff she'd sold because he'd stopped making payments on his storage unit: "You didn't want that bed anyway. She probably slept with that other guy right there on that bed, all the time."

There's an urgency here. It's as though Stuever's project is to resuscitate all of American life as it's really lived, without sentiment and without resorting to the little boxes we dishonestly force our lives into. Stuever wants to prove that our little stories, told truly, have their own drama, their own significance.

Certainly they do to Stuever. Making sense of these lives and their places has consumed his writing life. And that's what makes his stories surprising. They aren't distant third-person narratives: They whisper, cajole, test, inform, plead and hang their heads in sorrow, all at an intimate level. They judge, in short. And even though Stuever overflows with generosity, he has his opinions, and out they spill.

Sometimes a lot of him gets in there, too: his loneliness, his intellectual restlessness, his personal sadness as he tries to cover the bombing in his hometown of Oklahoma City. Newspapers usually don't get this personal, often for good reason. But this search for personal meaning is integral to Stuever's work. Maybe it's as important to him as a great one- liner, and "Off Ramp" has lots of them. But maybe not. In combination, they make him a devastating feature writer, one you're happy to follow to the unlikeliest places, off the freeway and up the frontage road.

As a boy, Hank Stuever dreamed of becoming Wonder Woman. He wore his sister's red tube tops, a blue-green pair of swim trunks he had outgrown and aluminum-foil bracelets. He lassoed neighborhood children, trying to get the truth out of them (Wonder Woman's lasso has the ability to make people tell the truth).

"I fought crime and lassoed little girls and twirled around in long red socks, and it was in this moment, seeing his [father's] angry face, that I realized there were things boys could not be. I could watch it on TV, but no more spinning around in the tube top ... "

Well, maybe some fairy godmother granted his wish, because Stuever eventually became a Wonder Woman of sorts. As an adult, Stuever has traveled around the country in his invisible jet, using his lasso to seek truth from people he meets in offbeat places.

The result: A collection of his truth-seeking and often humorous pieces called Off Ramp.

Stuever, however, also seems to have superpowers of his own when it comes to writing about his subjects. He is good at reading people. For example, when the young bride-to-be in a piece called "Modern Bride," Darleine, is planning her bachelorette party, she can be heard thinking: "The guys have a bachelor party. This is just us girls saying, `"Hey, we can have fun, too."' It doesn't mean anything. I am going to get really drunk. I can't wait."

Moments later, her father, Danny, walks in hoping Darleine's party has ended and: "He unlocks the door and steps into his quiet den, turns on the light, contemplates the melting chocolate erection, the remnants of a pink-icing testicle on the carpet, shakes his head, turns off the light, and goes to bed."

It takes a certain amount of skill and talent to get so comfortable with your sources, that they can truly be themselves. Off Ramp is full of other great examples. He shadows men and women as they get ready for the much anticipated Star Wars prequel, as a former child star gets ready to run for the governor's seat of California, as a young man balances his calling and fears as a funeral home director.

His humor is a combination of his own voice and keen observations. I wanted to avoid the "comparison subject," but it must be tackled, we all know. Some reviewers have compared Stuever to literary funny man David Sedaris. Truth is, Sedaris has become the standard for "funny" in the literary world. And rightly so.

Case in point, a friend and I were watching a television program about a gorilla that drew a picture. The image he drew looked funny. It was supposed to be a tree, but it looked as if the tree was going through a nervous breakdown or a really bad hair day. My friend immediately said, "That gorilla is as funny as David Sedaris, if he could write." See what I mean?

There are many writers who are funny and profound at the same time, and each one has a unique style. Such is the case of Stuever.

In a piece called "All Faiths," about a young funeral director in Texas, he writes about a woman, Mary, as she searches for funeral services on a budget. Her son had just been shot to death. She picks up the phone to call a funeral home "And I'm thinking as I'm listening to the message, All Face? All Face? What kind of name is that?" She leaves a message anyway With her family in tow, Mary makes her way to All Face. She lets out a little gasp when they pull into the parking lot. Then she giggles. All Faiths. How surreal is this, she wonders, even in the depths of sorrow, to be able to laugh."

So can Stuever. He is always good at finding humor in not-so-funny situations, including a piece he wrote after the bombing in Oklahoma City, his hometown.

In this book, we get to see how Stuever was able to use his Wonder Woman-like powers. In some rare occasions we get to see a glimpse of himself. Those are enjoyable moments. Maybe next time, we can hope to see Stuever using his truth-seeking lasso more on himself.

The Seattle Times: "An offbeat, right-on sense of place," July 23, 2004
By J. Patrick Coolican
Newspapers are governed by what might be called the Tyranny of the Nut Graf. This is the paragraph near the top of a story that summarizes the one point the story is trying to make, because a newspaper story can say only one thing. Everything else in the story the quotes from a man-on-the-street, the statistics culled from Census data, the documents obtained serve to bolster the nut graf.

Although the nut graf may be tyrannical, it is a benevolent tyranny when done well, guiding readers through complex events, conflicts and ideas. Whenever you read a newspaper story and ask yourself, "What in the world is this about?" which is probably too often it's because there's no nut graf, or a shoddy one, or one contradicted by the rest of the story. There but for the grace of the nut graf go I. And yet, it can serve to put otherwise imaginative minds in a vise grip of tedious thinking and writing.

One of the many pleasures of reading Hank Stuever's collection of his newspaper stories, "Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere" (Henry Holt, 297 pp., $24) is his insistent rebellion against this tyranny, his refusal to sum up, to say only one thing. That, along with his curiosity, taste for the offbeat, humility and mellifluous phrasing, combine to make this book a great summer read, a reminder that reading a newspaper can sometimes be a joy and not some tedious civic chore, like raking autumn leaves. (There's your nut graf.)

Stuever began his career at the Albuquerque Tribune. His pieces from that era show a knack for recognizing the bizarre American institutions that we pretend are perfectly normal, like the Kampgrounds of America. "The mind startles awake and panics: Killer or bear? But it's just a tent down in the wind, it's just kampin' hijinks, with a constant thunder of Interstate 40 a few yards away on the other side of a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire, a chorus of passing eighteen wheelers."

He persuades a young couple engaged to be married to allow him to follow the progress of their wedding plans, and though the portrayal isn't flattering, it isn't smarmy or off-putting because it's so wickedly true. The bachelor party, strippers offering up their breasts, covered with whipped cream: "They jerk the breast away, wipe it off with a towel, and move on to the next man, all of which goes on for a half hour, the men lining up for this macho communion."

At the Austin American-Statesman, Stuever's next career stop, he writes a profile of a funeral home that has gone down-market, his eye for detail perfect: "Robert sets about straightening flowers around the casket, because a funeral director is always slightly adjusting everything pulling cloth taut, straightening stacks of song sheets or prayer cards, making them flush to the edge of the table."

Simple curiosities continue to drive Stuever at The Washington Post, where he currently resides. Why do all my credit-card bills come from Wilmington, Del.? he asks before going there and writing about America's addiction to debt. How does a waterbed store stay in business these days? he asks before going to "the nail-saloniest, carpet warehousiest, noodle-bowliest, car-stereo installationiest part of good, old Route 1" to find out.

>When The Post sends him on a significant news story, like the California governor recall, he's able to bring his offbeat sensibility and ear for rhythm. He writes like a loping stray from the journalistic pack: "California was behaving like a celebrity gone off her meds, broke and bipolar, babbling incoherently into an invisible phone, toothless and trespassing and asking for help."

The book closes with his report from Oklahoma City, his hometown, just after the terrorist attack on a federal building there in 1995. Granted, he has a significant advantage, but despite the hordes of reporters there, no one conveys the feel of the place like Stuever. And that could be said of nearly every place he writes about.

J. 2Patrick Coolican runs the politics Web site for Seattle Times.

The Daily Oklahoman: "Author chronicles offbeat sights, experiences," July 18, 2004
By Dennie Hall
It's no wonder that Hank Stuever included a section about Oklahoma City in his book called "Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere" (Henry Holt, $24).

After all, he was born and raised in Oklahoma City. He then worked for newspapers in Albuquerque, N.M., and Austin, Texas, before becoming a staff writer for the Washington Post.

His book's title gives a clue that the stories are not the earthshaking variety. Rather, Stuever looks beyond the main highways to the offbeat stories found in such places as funeral homes and KOA campgrounds.

In a chapter titled "Unassigned Lands," the author examines the Oklahoma City bombing but goes beyond the usual reportage. He lets us know that, for a time, we "consumed more fast food per capita than anywhere else." He continues, "Here is a self-contained world with 11 Wal-Marts, 43 McDonald restaurants, 33 Taco Bells, four shopping malls, and, by one count, 522 Baptist churches."

In a chapter called "I Don't Know How to Love Him," Stuever describes what goes on backstage at performances of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Of interest is the woman who follows the show from city to city. "The cast and crew are a little spooked by her devotion, especially when she follows them to dinner at restaurants. Or shows up at the hotel with a camera and needs to see Jesus."

Stuever seems especially inspired in giving the history and functions of plastic chairs. It is remarkable how anyone could take such a mundane subject and come up with such an interesting essay.

The author's chapter on "Living Alone" speculates about people who now live by themselves.

"What is the real story here?" he asks. "Florida widows? Bridget Jones cliches? Toxic bachelors? Toxic gay bachelors? Sitcom neighbors who always live in the unit across the hall?"

Stuever's writing is fresh and invigorating and reveals a mind that is always alert to the offbeat.

He tells how the "elsewhere" became his beat after he tired of routine stories. "I took on that which was contained, as in the Container Store, and also that which was uncontained, which felt loose, wild, krazy." (That's how he spells crazy, just as he sometimes spells kountry, kastles, kampgrounds and komfort.)

Austin American-Statesman: "Off the Road: When most journalists speed away, Hank Stuever pulls over," July 18, 2004
By Jeff Salamon
At some point in everybody's junior-high experience, an English teacher hikes his right pants leg up a few inches, sits on the corner of his desk, nonchalantly throws a piece of chalk in the air, catches it, and explains the basis of all stories: conflict. It's a moment of revelation for most youngsters. (The chalk gets tossed a few more times while the wonder sinks in.) Unfortunately, it's a lesson that's been forgotten by many features writers, especially those who are too besotted with their subjects to notice that an actual story only occurs when said subject rubs up against a problem.

Which is one reason Washington Post reporter Hank Stuever's debut collection of articles, "Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere," is so good. Each story, for all its wit and verbal pyrotechnics, is built around a conflict of one sort or another.

Most of the time the conflict is rather abstract -- though that doesn't stop it from completely warping the trajectory of somebody's life. The offbeat Americans who populate Stuever's stories aren't campaigning politicians or courtroom litigants or world-weary homicide detectives. They are, with a few exceptions, people whose names would have never shown up in a Nexis database had Stuever not cast his eye upon them. Morticians, waterbed salespeople, middle- aged roller skaters -- these are the strategists, the casualties and, sometimes, the last men and women standing in the unceasing battle between their ideas of how the world should be and how the world actually is.

"Off Ramp," which includes a handful of stories Stuever wrote while he was a staffer at the American-Statesman in the 1990s, is set in the place he calls "Elsewhere": "the big-box stores, the municipal arenas, the empty lots surrounded by fences. The optimistically named suburbs that were already fading, the drive- thrus, the multiplexes, the strip, the drag, the freeway spans under construction, the futon places, the yogurt places, the 10-minute lube places, the Slurpees, the billboards offering open-sided MRI scans." And: ". . . extended-stay corporate suite motels filled with temporary, transient souls. . . . self-storage facilities that held the secret, unwanted narrative of divorces, business failures, or broken Ping-Pong tables. . . . almost-dead shopping malls."

In other words, the most numbingly depressing places that urban zoning regulations and the interstate highway system have dumped on F. Scott Fitzgerald's fresh green breast of the new world.

So why is Stuever's work so much fun? Perhaps because he's got a conflict or two of his own going on. Though he's half in love with the fantasists among us, Stuever never breathes the helium of their weightless reveries (and thereby succumb to sentimentality -- another hallmark of Bad Feature Writing). He keeps tying them down to the hard facts scribbled down in his reporter's notebook. The twentysomething woman who thinks a pull-out sofa will turn her apartment into Sleepover Central must face the fact that no guest ever spent a night on the couch. The thirtysomething guy who hangs a punching bag from his basement rafters admits that he "punched it a few times until it seemed that by doing this the ceiling might collapse on top of him, so he unhooked it from the rafters and did not punch it again." The mortician who considers a corpse his canvas is later observed as he "wiggles the knife and prods around, puncturing organs, sucking out body gases and tissue."

Stuever is, in short, a rare creature: a pedant who cherishes dreamers.

The result is a collection of articles that split the difference between sarcasm and empathy. Stuever pokes fun at his subjects, but he never quite wounds because he's no crueler to them than he is to himself. These are, after all, the people he has chosen to spend his life with. He may be the family wiseass, but he's still a member of the family.

Having spent his early years gay and Catholic in a place that was overwhelmingly straight and Baptist, he writes, "I was a child born and raised and now living in a permanent Elsewhere, and because I didn't have a beat, I gave myself one." When he returns to his hometown of Oklahoma City on the occasion of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, he remembers, "If anything, I was a strange and bored child of God in my own Unassigned Lands. I jumped off the roof wearing a Hefty bag for a parachute. I buried myself in comic books. I imagined living on other planets, in other places, with other families."

In the comic book version of his life, this is Stueverman's origin story. And in his mighty hands, the coal of his subjects' lives is pressed into pure cubic zirconia.

Describing a family photo, Stuever finds something macabre beside the toothy smiles: "Danny, Lucille, Denise and Darleine in the snowy woods a few years ago, posing around a dead deer. The majestic head with antlers is held up, the dark animal eyes turned flashbulb- white, a spot of blood dripping on the snowy ground. This is the Garcia family at their happiest."

Investigating the effect of a scene in "The Silence of the Lambs" on an entire profession, he prompts an absurdity worthy of Beckett: "Every storage-unit manager has seen the movie, but the discovery of human remains in storage units is, in fact, relatively rare. So says the man from the Self Storage Association in Cincinnati, to my complete disappointment. ('I have a guy who stores English muffins,' he offers, as a consolation.)"

After the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia he discovers the narcissism that underlies too much public mourning: "The customers in the (NASA-themed) souvenir shop aren't paying attention when the president's eulogy ends and more hymns are sung. One woman is looking for stickers: 'I just finished my September 11 memory book and here it is something else already. You can't keep up.'"

Getting material like that requires work -- gaining the subject's confidence, asking the right questions, being pushy. But at some point you just have to quiet down and pay attention. Though "Off Ramp" isn't intended as such, it can take its place among the books that serve as guides to observing the world around us, such as John R. Stilgoe's "Outside Lies Magic" or John Berger's "Ways of Seeing." Stuever's prose style is seductive (after reading him, it's tough to avoid going parentheses-happy)(see?), but his knack for standing back and simply noticing things is even more contagious. While reading his book at the Magnolia Cafe on South Congress Avenue, I perked my ears up and heard a prototypical middle-aged Texan with a flattop crew cut and a thick drawl singing the praises of Paxil.

(I also noticed that the waiter forgot to bring my cantaloupe plate, but that's neither here nor there.)

In fact, by the middle of "Off Ramp," a reader may start thinking so much like Stuever that odd little things will begin jumping out of the book itself. Like the fact that minor rocker Eddie Money pops up in two consecutive essays written three years apart. The first time, "Take Me Home Tonight" is playing in a Maryland Kmart. The second time, "Baby Hold On" is blasting in an Austin roller-skating rink.

Whether this is a coincidence or a carefully planned effect really makes no difference. Any public space that draws on the great wasteland that was FM radio circa 1977 or 1986 isn't just an Elsewhere -- it's on the verge of being a Nowhere.

Hank Stuever hangs out there so we don't have to.

(Books Editor Jeff Salamon started working at the American- Statesman a few weeks after Hank Stuever left.)

The Denver Post: "Main Street stories off the beaten path," July 18, 2004
By Steve Weinberg
Most journalists who write newspaper features are unknown outside their circulation areas. Hank Stuever, a 30-something newspaper staff writer reared in Oklahoma City, used to write for the Albuquerque Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. Now he writes for The Washington Post, a justly famous newspaper, but not really a national newspaper in the manner of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or USA Today. Until I received 'Off Ramp,' a collection of 26 features previously published in the Albuquerque, Austin and Washington, D.C., newspapers, I had never read anything by Stuever.

He is determinedly idiosyncratic in his choice of subjects. The title of the book, 'Off Ramp,' suggests leaving the interstate highway of life to explore little-known byways. The subtitle, referring to the 'American Elsewhere,' suggests that mainstream celebrity culture, so fascinating to so many journalists (and, apparently, readers), holds little attraction for Stuever.

Journalists who are so self-consciously idiosyncratic run the danger of overreaching, of coming across as offbeat merely for the sake of getting attention. You can dismiss many as show-offs.

Stuever is blessedly not a show-off. It turns out that he is a master of chronicling the lives of the nonfamous going about their nearly anonymous lives. Most important, Stuever imbues the exterior mundaneness of those lives with low-key significance that reaches to the core of the human condition.

>In a preface, Stuever explains his philosophies of story selection and writing style, matters that should entertain and inform nonjournalists and journalists alike. While most newspaper reporters work a 'beat' - the police, city hall, the school system - a relative few manage to avoid such pigeonholing.

Stuever explains that gradually, 'The Elsewhere became my beat the big-box stores, the municipal arenas, the empty lots surrounded by fences. The optimistically named suburbs that were already fading, the drive-throughs, the multiplexes, the strip, the drag, the freeway spans under construction, the futon places, the yogurt places, the 10-minute lube places, the Slurpees, the billboards offering open-sided MRI scans I liked 'plazas' that weren't actually plazas, and favored strip centers with names like 'garden' and 'glen' and 'meadows' in their names, especially when nothing about them featured anything natural I liked self-storage facilities that held the secret, unwanted narrative of divorces, business failures or broken Ping-Pong tables.'

Through a mixture of compelling writing style and deep reflection (all memorable writers think through their themes before publishing), Stuever, as he says, could, in a seemingly mundane locale, 'find the Lord, death, porn, destruction, tanning booths and teriyaki chicken bowls.'

As for journalistic technique, one shared by Stuever is his request to use the bathroom when interviewing somebody at her or his home. ' It's just another way further in,' he says, 'down the hall, on your right, past all those fascinating pictures of the children when they were in high school, including the one your subject didn't yet mention, the child who drowned in 1973. The little pearly soaps in the dish by the sink, the potpourri Glade, the old issue of Cosmopolitan opened to the horoscope. I can't tell you why - or if - these things belong in your notebook, but more than once, while writing a story, I have been relieved to see them in mine.'

The first piece of the 26 collected is 'The Couch That Warped Space-Time.' It is about a Washington, D.C., couple who bought two sleeper sofas, then found neither would fit up the stairs of their three-story row house. So those sofas sat elsewhere in the home, a reminder of failure, an occasional challenge for would-be movers. Then, somewhere half-forgotten, the husband hears about a type of worker called a sofa surgeon. He and his wife start calling around, and that is how they find John Errico. He disassembles sofas, moves the pieces, then reassembles them in the desired room.

As Errico works, he tells his tale: 'Thirteen years of moving couches through space, and only once has he ever been defeated,' Stuever reports, 'by a two-piece sectional and an impossible doorway Sometimes the customers cannot bear to watch. 'The initial reaction is that they don't want to see it, they don't believe it can be done,' Errico says. 'They think sofas are constructed like tanks. Most people are quite astounded when it's all over. Like you turned water into wine."

Errico leaves his bill for $125, and drives off. Stuever moves to the next feature story, and you, like I, could be hooked to read the remaining 25.

(Steve Weinberg is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.)

San Francisco Chronicle: "Apologies to Gertrude Stein: There is an Elsewhere There," July 11, 2004 By Josh Green
>The Bay Area is not America.

Neither is New York. And don't even try to make a case for Sacramento.

America's soul isn't to be found in reality TV, Internet bloggers or the mainstream media's unimaginative pronouncements about the country's collective feelings during crises and elections.

No, America is made up of regular folks doing regular things in places we've never seen or heard of. Washington Post columnist Hank Stuever believes that extraordinary things can be learned from these ordinary people. His marvelous collection of columns, "Off Ramp," delivers the kind of stories that make readers believe this, too. He claims to be in pursuit of the America that lies outside the boundaries set by cities, culture and Nielsen demographics. He calls it the "American Elsewhere," and he's more than comfortable in it:

>"Gradually, the Elsewhere became my beat, my source, my writerly home: the big-box stores, the municipal arenas, the empty lots surrounded by fences. ... I took on that which was contained, as in the Container Store, and also that which was uncontained, which felt loose, wild, krazy."

But don't be fooled by the book's title: Stuever is not out to craft a road trip memoir in the "Blue Highways" genre or a witty travelogue with apologies to Bill Bryson. His locales are at the margins of wherever he happened to be working or living: Oklahoma City (where he grew up); Austin, Texas; Albuquerque; and Washington, D.C. But we're left to wonder: Isn't the American Elsewhere, um, elsewhere? A full exploration of the American Elsewhere should have taken the author to other blighted exurbs, mini-malls and skating rinks, and his omission of California -- where some of the most bizarre forms of American culture have flourished (has he visited the Slabs at the Salton Sea?) -- is a noticeable East Coast snub. (There is one exception: In one piece, Stuever goes inside the Gary Coleman campaign for governor, but we could all do without a reminder of that painful episode.)

Stuever's subjects cover a wide range, from "sofa surgeons" to bombings, and this makes his task of compiling coherent observations built on a theme more difficult. On the surface, his cast of characters has nothing in common - - a Texas funeral home director, a Dallas housewife, a "Star Wars" gossip fanatic, a skating rink manager -- but their individual worldviews are intertwined by the shared invisibility of the Elsewhere. Stuever's insightful character sketches put them in the context of larger events and encourage readers' natural voyeurism, and we can't help but peep into the windows of the next person, and the next.

Shared grief and fear stand behind Stuever's most powerful essays. He tracks the reaction of Texans to the 2003 space shuttle crash, in which pieces of the shuttle and its astronauts were scattered over a swath of land hundreds of miles long. Then he moves to post-bombing Oklahoma City, where the yawning open wound of the Murrah Building brings together shell-shocked residents. His personal ties to Oklahoma City endow his musings on death and community with particular resonance: "When it comes down to it, I didn't hear the boom, and for that, I am hardly Oklahoman anymore, not part of this citywide group hug." Stuever takes a hairpin turn in his Sept. 11 essay -- instead of another elegiac dirge he reports on what happens to the Miss America pageant's rosy optimism the day after the attacks (it survives).

Stuever is a master of the journalist's Holy Grail: the perfect lead. His opening zingers are irresistible. Here are some of his best hooks: "There's something about the plastic patio chair. No, there's not. And that's what it is about them." "Like almost any temporary visitor to Los Angeles, I arrived there happy, to the overbaked bliss of summer, and left slightly creeped out." "Is it the star-spangled panties?" (For the puzzled: It's a column on Wonder Woman.) "Let's say you're dead. You keel over before the end of this sentence, before we've even begun. He is ready." Stuever is at his best when describing a scene (a roadside KOA campground, for instance) or tailing a character. He loses his edge when he becomes too enamored of his own philosophical rhapsody, as he does in a longish essay on Chandra Levy. And there are several spots where his editor was too lax, allowing him to dump the contents of his notebook onto the page, perhaps to fill out his shorter columns.

Though the result is sometimes jumbled, Stuever is skilled enough to keep his essays afloat. Stuever's book is worth reading for the writing alone. But it's worth space on your shelf because his essays remind us that the Elsewhere -- perhaps the most honest, ugly and unabashed expression of what being American means -- is out there and deserves a visit once in a while.

Josh Green is a Berkeley writer.

Booklist, July 1, 2004
Stuever, a staff writer in the "Style" section of the Washington Post, offers an absorbing look at the "marginal things" in American life, "the funny quirks of what is bland and true." Drawing on his experiences writing for newspapers from Albuquerque to Texas to Washington, D.C., the journalist covers the "American Elsewhere." Eschewing major news, scoops, or prizewinning stories, Stuever brings glimpses into ordinary America: two couples in Plano, Texas, who subject their homes and friendships to the rigors of the Trading Spaces home-decorating show; an Albuquerque family in the weeks leading up to the overly elaborate wedding of their youngest daughter; a group of Texans searching for fragments from the fallen Columbia spacecraft; and the fractured world of Stuever's grandfather after the bombing in Oklahoma City. With an incredible eye for detail, Stuever offers observations of the minutiae and underlying passions of American life.--Vanessa Bush

Out Magazine, July 2004
Throughout this collection of articles by Stuever, an openly gay Washington Post staff writer, he finds the profound in life's minutiae. A piece called "Other People's Stuff" hilariously chronicles America's "crap crisis"Ñover 9.7 billion cubic feet of stuff is saved in rental storage unitsÑbut also reveals our fear of leaving the past behind and points out the inherent loneliness of a life devoted to consumerism. "Modern Bride," which could be read as a cautionary tale for marriage-minded gays, details a straight couple's overwrought preparations for their ever-expanding $25,000 wedding. Gayer yet, "Evil Queens" parses the symbolic cultural meaning of Survivor's out nudist winner, Richard Hatch.--Christopher Carbone

SOMA Magazine, July 2004
It's no surprise that the author of this collection of essays writes for the style section of The Washington Post--he's both highly skilled at reading American society through its cultural artifacts (plastic chairs, overstuffed couches, KOA campgrounds) and, like all good fashionistas, pays attention to the details. Stuever takes time with his subject matter, be it patiently documenting the (difficult-to-stomach) activities of a discount funeral parlor or offering a Jungian analysis of Star Wars prequel dreams. Off Ramp is a thoughtful examination of modern American life that looks "elsewhere," to the decaying strip malls and banal suburban landscapes that populate our nation, and delivers humorous and poignant portraits of the people who live there. (He even sought out a Howard Johnson's waitress to interview.) Never before has Kmart been written about with such melancholy. -- Andrea Richards

Texas Monthly: Previews & Reviews, July 2004 Two-time Pulitzer finalist Hank Stuever pays loving homage to America's soft, strange underbelly in "Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere" (Henry Holt). The pieces, some previously published while Stuever was writing for the Austin American-Statesman and the Albuquerque Tribune and others from his current gig at the Washington Post, betray an affinity for oddball subject matter, like a discount funeral home in Austin or an auction of the abandoned contents of self-storage units. Stuever launches into smart and funny flights of fancy around each, a keen tour guide to places we've passed but never fully appreciated.—Mike Shea

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 20, 2004
"Gradually," says journalist Hank Stuever, who now writes for the Style section of the Washington Post, "the Elsewhere became my beat, my source, my writerly home: the big-box stores, the municipal arenas, the empty lots surrounded by fences ... the futon places, the ten minute lube places, the Slurpees, the billboards offering open-sided MRI scans. ... I wanted exclusive rights to stories about embalming; algebra; bedrooms; breakfast cereal; and pieces of furniture that cost under $500." And he got it. Stuever grew up in Oklahoma City (his essay on the city post-bombing, "Unassigned Lands" is in many ways the spine of this collection). His grandmother used to take him to a French cafe in the mall, which he believed as a young boy was actually France. This little anecdote explains a lot about Stuever's eye for Amerika. Another essay, "Prequel Dreams" describes the year in high school when Stuever's parents divorced and he took refuge in the local comic book store. (Fortunately, Luke Skywalker was also having trouble with his father that year.) Liner notes liken Stuever to David Sedaris and Joan Didion (even going so far as to say he is their brainchild!). But Stuever is a poor man's Sedaris or David Foster Wallace. It's one thing to be assigned a story on Wal-Mart. It's another to really like going there.--Susan Salter Reynolds

Chicago Tribune: May 23, 2004
SUMMER BOOKS PREVIEW
In this collection of previously published essays and profiles, Washington Post writer Hank Stuever combs the countryside in search of offbeat people, rich conflicts and somber reactions to the modern world. His accounts range from heartfelt--Oklahoma City after the 1995 federal building bombing--to the flippant, such as a man's hunt for his long-lost sofa bed. Stuever's voice maintains a comfortable balance between the sardonic and the empathetic. His is a refreshing take on America.

Publishers Weekly: May 17, 2004
The American landscape is ripe with humor and pathos. And it's been Stuever's privilege for the past 14 years to chronicle the people who populate it. Part social commentary, part paean to ordinary life, this is Stuever's valentine to America's everyman. It's a compilation of newspaper articles he wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune, Austin American-Statesman and the Washington Post. These quiet observational pieces visit the author's muse, Elsewhere, which he defines as a place "that offers what I considered to be true mystery. If I was looking, I could find the Lord, death, porn, destruction, tanning booths and teriyaki chicken bowls." And that's just for openers. The real journey Stuever, a staff writer for the Washington Post, takes is both personal and profound. Whether documenting a wedding in New Mexico, two best friends in Plano, Tex., who swap decorating challenges on Trading Spaces or the challenge of getting a huge sofa into a Washington, D.C., apartment, Stuever looks deep into the American psyche. In his quiet, gentle way, he records our banalities and triumphs. He casts the net wide-and what he catches is a nation gripped by longing, loss, hope and social convention. Stuever does not overtly judge his subjects, but he neatly inserts subtle mocks and digs. Still, his empathy and his humanity are evident on every page. This tender, funny, compelling collection is an homage to the rhythms and cadences of modern life.

Kirkus Reviews: May 3, 2004
Observant, compassionate collection of newspaper pieces exploring America's odd corners. Oklahoman Stuever, now a Washington Post Style section writer, having reported from locales including LA, Albuquerque, and Austin, describes his beat of defunct malls, K-Marts, and sci-fi conventions as "Elsewhere . . . the kind of world where I look for ideas, for joy and loss and the marginal things, the funny quirks of what is bland and true." The 26 essays and profiles here range from offbeat consumer studies to artful deconstructions of common rituals, all of them underpinned by notes of angst, isolation, and millennial fearfulness. The self-deprecating author ("I got lost a lot . . . and I was not terribly cool") proves adept at fly-on-the-wall reportage, insinuating himself into the lives of quirky or mildly desperate individuals without imposing his own personality on their situations. Many essays find a starting point in pop-culture phenomena: "Panic Rooms," for example, depicts the cable TV show Trading Spaces' Darwinian effect on two home-owning strivers in Plano, Texas, who submit to its redecorating schemes. "The Josie Problem" and "Wonder Woman's Powers" look at the histories, creators, and strange commercial afterlives of a TV show and a comic-book series that both present oddball visions of female empowerment and are beloved by gay men. Some pieces were clearly written in response to current events: "Recallifornia" finds an ideal metaphor for that state's troubled gubernatorial process in the lonely, cynical, yet indefatigable person of Gary Coleman, while "Evil Queens" reminds us of Richard Hatch, the Survivor schemer we loved to hate. "Modern Bride" is a detailed yet ambiguous take on a mid-sized wedding thrown by a middle-class Hispanic family. The best essays--a piece on storage-unit culture and a haunting personalization of the Oklahoma City bombing--dig deeper into our domestic isolation and wanderlust. Stuever's work recalls that of David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs (who provides a blurb), but it's generally sweeter and less biting. Low-key, modest pleasures.