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Off Ramp

Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere

Picador, July 2005
ISBN: 978-0-312-42488-6, ISBN10: 0-312-42488-4,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 320 pages,
Trade Paperback, $16.00

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Categories and Subcategories

See All Categories Geography Geography - All Titles Literature Literary Criticism, Essays, & Biography

Stuever's well-crafted and touching reports take us to everyday places where the increasingly unusual realities of today's world run rampant. The author—twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—calls this terrain the American Elsewhere. He finds it by bypassing Big News and taking off ramps to places where seemingly ordinary people lead lives just slightly off-kilter. Stuever's Elsewhere extends through trailer parks, roller rinks, malls no longer sparkling, and suburbs where robot dogs growl and bored children jump off rooftops using Hefty-bag parachutes.

From Star Wars conventions to credit disasters, from snipers to missing persons, there is always something happening in Elsewhere—and Stuever never misses it. In Off Ramp, his destinations include Plano, Texas, home of two friends both named Angie ('Plano princesses') who turn home décor disasters over to a TV decorating show and wind up at war against orange carpet. In Washington, D.C, we meet a pony-tailed 'sofa surgeon' who confronts the mysteries of the universe and couches that won't fit through doorways. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a spiral-permed secretary begins an odyssey toward marriage that takes her from anxiety dreams ('I'm walking down the aisle and nobody is looking at me or anything') to anxiety that has no end and no cure—and is no dream.

With Stuever as our guide, we visit discount funeral homes as well as RV campgrounds where international bonds are formed. We also meet comic book artists, professional bowlers, waterbed aficionados, and some Texans on a 'debris drive' in search of pieces of the fallen Columbia space shuttle. Finally, we travel to Stuever's hometown of Oklahoma City, where the bombing of the Murrah federal building has created a kind of Elsewhere the author has never seen before.

Praise

"Wildly funny, caustic, subversive, and a little bizarre around the edges. Stuever's essays display a wonderfully original and confident voice."—Augusten Burroughs

"These 'elsewheres,' as he calls them, are Stuever's specialty . . . They form a coherent, often funny, even lovely rendering of one man's curious embrace of the world."—Washingtonian

"[Stuever] reaches to the core of the human condition . . . A mixture of compelling writing style and deep reflection."—The Denver Post

"His curiosity, taste for the offbeat, humility, and mellifluous phrasing combine to make this book . . . a reminder that reading a newspaper can sometimes be a joy and not some tedious civic chore."—The Seattle Times

"Marvelous . . . worth reading for the writing alone."—San Francisco Chronicle

"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 L.A., 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 takeon 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 [yet is] generally sweeter and less biting. [This is a book of] low-key, modest pleasures."—Kirkus Reviews

"Stuever, staff writer with 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-redecorating 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.”—Booklist

"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 . . . [H]is empathy and his humanity are evident on every page. This tender, funny, and compelling collection is an homage to the rhythms and cadences of modern life."—Publishers Weekly

About the Author(s)

Hank Stuever

Hank Stuever's work is currently seen in The Washington Post, where he is a staff writer. He has twice been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and has appeared on Today, MSNBC, and various radio programs. He lives in Washington, D.C. Please visit his Web site at www.hankstuever.com.

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