Dancing on the border of fact and imagination

American letters have long suffered such outbreaks of lying mania — a kind of cyclical St. Vitus’s dance of fabrication and deception. A cumulative effect of this perennial concern has been the erection in literary culture — and the marketing of its products — of rigid barriers between fiction and nonfiction. Since the intensity of our pleasures are easily swayed by what we think we’re supposed to be getting, we’ve begun to expect and derive different satisfactions from each. This naturalized, de facto border poses a problem of classification for a writer like Jake Silverstein, for whom “a border is the beginning of deceit.’’

Silverstein’s wonderful, hybrid “Nothing Happened and Then It Did’’ uses the border between fiction and nonfiction not as an area of prohibition but as a place of play and dialogue. In this, his first book, Silverstein, a rare master practitioner of long-form narrative journalism, offers a hilarious, subtle, and empathetic examination of writing and identity. Equal parts memoir and novel — chapters alternate fact and fiction and are clearly labeled as such — “Nothing Happened’’ is an odd, beguiling bildungsroman of “Jake Silverstein,’’ the authorial sensibility that unites each bizarre tale.

The book is set primarily in the arid deserts of west Texas and Mexico, where Silverstein settled as a young journalist, guided by the “notion that it would be good, both financially and journalistically, to live someplace where there was nothing happening. That way, when something did happen there would be no one but [him] to write about it.’’ While roaming these barren, lonely places and awaiting the arrival of a story, Silverstein concludes that, “Alone on the plain, a man tells himself stories about who he is that draw from both domains. Fact and fabrication are opposites only where there is a society to verify or deny; for a man in isolation — and who is not? — the two share a greater taxonomy.’’

“Nothing Happened’’ moves beyond Silverstein’s ruminations to accompany paranoid treasure hunters on the dig of a lifetime, to reveal the inner workings of a Mexican road race that seem like Russian roulette by other means, and to help an aging, obsessive diarist search for his long-lost sister, among other incidents.

The book’s strongest single chapter details Silverstein’s infiltration of the Famous Poets Society, a type of convention-center Burning Man for timid oak-tree versifiers. Originally published in Harper’s, the piece is uproarious, withering, and surprisingly empathetic. The convention, in Silverstein’s telling, supplies a forum for a nearly endearing form of middle American aspiration and pretension. People ennoble their lives and their passions by performing before their (also) limited phrasemaker colleagues. And they can win cash. While attending a conference seminar, Silverstein watches as the poet-teacher crumples a sheet of paper, posing the question, “How do you spell a sound like this?’’ While the seminarians strain uselessly with the “god-like privilege of inventing words,’’ Silverstein muses, in a passage of typical, wry understatement, “It occurred to me that baffled silence may be [the teacher’s] primary goal as an artist . . . [that] the whole lecture seemed to be built around questions that caused the mind to go slack.’’

Despite its brilliance, the poetry caper isn’t the heart of the collection — it’s removed from the terrain that inspires Silverstein’s subtler tales. Enthralled equally by legend and history, enraptured by the desert landscape, and enlivened by the voice of a uniquely American writer, “Nothing Happened’’ is a road song of a book, with its journeys located in both time and space. Silverstein’s obsessive exploration of 19th-century writer Ambrose Bierce’s disappearance, with its attempt to bring intuition, chance, and the influence of the devil into alignment with more sober historical tools, provides the book’s most representative section. Fidelity to the facts is not always the best way to keep faith with experience.

“I do not,’’ Silverstein writes, “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.’’

The etymology of the word fiction is something formed, as if the fanciful nature of a tale is the result of its shaping. Nonfiction, as a genre, is ghettoized by prefix; it is without shaping. An absurd habit of thought but one that persists. This persistence goes to the heart of Silverstein’s weird, compelling project. In a culture where things are either one thing or another — good/bad, true/false — ambiguity is treated as a stage one passes through on the way to the fulfillment of one’s worst expectations. “Nothing Happened’’ is the strangest, if not the best, book about doing journalism — about finding, chasing, and crafting a story — because of its radical reliance on ambiguity. It is also about the self-discovery a writer may achieve through that process.

Michael Washburn is the assistant director of the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.