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

The average rating for Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-01 00:00:00 John Powers Short stories are often hit and miss. This mostly missed despite the laundry list of good reviews. Chapter 3 on the poetry competition in the casino had some good caricatures. I did like this opening to one story "Summer in New Orleans is a long slow thing. Day and night, a heavy heat presides. Rivulets of sweat run down the necks and arms and legs of unlucky pedestrians. Dogs retreat under houses. Waiters stand idle at outdoor cafes, fanning themselves with menus. The unreasonable drives off tourists and as they go, so goes the city's main industry. Throughout the town the pinch sets in. Rents are missed. Bald tires go unreplaced on cars. Couches are torn apart for loose change once, twice, even three times. It is an idle, maudlin time, a time to close up shutters and tie streamers to your air conditioner; to lie around drinking very weak drinks while you plot ways of scraping by that involve neither exertion nor exposure." And this next passage reminds me of being on the road and recently turning over a new leaf by trading in my old Toyota... with great reluctance and a heavy heart... "The night before the Toyota was to be towed I went to Edison's garage to clean out the glove compartment. The car was sitting int he corner of the lot, bumper familiarly askew. I knew every inch of her--the dried ketchup splotch on the steering wheel from a road meal en route to New Orleans, the missing radio tuner knob where I'd fashioned a handle with a square end U-bolt, the pattern of wear on the gas pedal's rubber cover, the look of the yellow seat stuffing where the vinyl upholstery was torn. She had treated me well, and I felt ashamed to be abandoning her on the high plains, thousands of miles from home, to be dismantled by some crude scrapper. I'd spoken more words in the direction of her cracked brown dashboard than at any one human ear, and although there was no record of it, I knew that in some sense she had transcribed my monologues." Also... "The widespread anxiety did not extend to Bartley, who sat coolly flipping pages, betraying nothing more than idle curiosity. He had the preternatural calm of certain Texan men for whom hysterics are as unbecoming as a pair of tasseled loafers."

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-20 00:00:00 Tonya Comeaux 11/22/2019 Update: If you want a book that blurs truth and fiction, just read The Things They Carried. It's not often that a book leaves me totally dumbfounded, but that's what we've got here. The introduction does work to lay out Silverstein's thesis, but its purpose/significance/value as an exploration of the narrative form is never fully fleshed out. I've noticed other reviewers mention that the book is boring, a statement to which I'll push back and instead say that the narrative feels mostly purposeless. You don't really come to care much about Silverstein's journey, since things mostly happen to him passively. In other words, while each chapter might be interesting in its own right (and they vary by significant degrees), more often than not you'll finish them and wonder "What is going on? Why did any of that matter? What am I supposed to take away from this?" The answers to these questions are elusive, and not in a good way. From the introduction: "Within this chronicle, every attempt has been made to separate the fact from the fabrication. Chapters identified as [fact] can be trusted not to deviate from what happened in real life, regardless of how novel or incredible they may seem; events related in [fiction chapters] are wholly invented. I do not wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done, only to permit the real to mingle with the imagined, as it does in the deserted labyrinth of the mind." I (obviously) have yet to determine what it means for a text to somehow both blend and separate fact and fiction. The fact that they are nearly indistinguishable must mean something. Should I come to any grand realization in future frustrated ponderings, I'll be sure to update here. For now, I'll call NHaTID an experiment with a foggy hypothesis and an even murkier result.