Michael Ventura, Same Genius as Ever

Let me be 100% clear from the start: Michael Ventura is one of my all-time favorite authors, and he is, for my money, one of maybe ten truly indispensible American authors working at present. If you live in a good city, you may've been lucky enough at some point in the last two decades to, in your local arts weekly, find a column titled Letters at 3AM. I grew up in the twin cities, and the City Pages, when it was still magic and fantastic, ran Ventura's Letters columns at, for me, a real critical time—like '95-2002, I think, or roughly thereabouts (the column still runs, every two weeks, in the Austin Chronicle). What happens when you're 16 and you read a guy talking about love being the magic it is because it breaks us out of pattern and offers glimpses of potential and promise we hope to still possess, or a guy writing a list of what he believes are the Solutions to Everything (and, better, when the Solutions are bullshit free in ways most info doesn't for 16 year olds)—what happens when you're 16 and you see writing like this is you feel almost comically grateful, like you've found some unspoiled river that runs right through everything, even if it's not what everyone's paying attention to.

But let's say you haven't spent time in a good city. Let's say you've just had access to books and bookstores. Fine: Ventura's the author of three novels, some poetry, and, with James Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World's Getting Worse. He's written screenplays for movies. From the evidence gathered in his latest book, If I Was a Highway, you may've seen the man at some point, driving cross-country—he drives a '69 green Chevy Malibu, he wears glasses, he's often got a fedora on (the one time I've seen the man, I saw him decked in exactly these specifications). Regardless of whether you know Ventura or not, though, I'm here to tell you now, for real, you need to know him. For real. You need to have this voice among yr books. You need to have this traveled voice in your head, if only as counterpoint, the half-trickster-ish voice that marks the best in American wisdom.

And what a voice: If I Was a Highway is a gathering of Ventura's Letters at 3AM columns (if you're the collecting sort, purchase this book and find old copies of Shadow Dancing in the USA and Letters at 3AM: Reports on Endarkenment and you've got, poof, instantly, a good chunk of columns by one of the best American columnists going). The Letters columns are wild, wise, dusty columns about self and identity, about travel and searching (for The Moviegoer fans, consider Ventura a Texas-style cousin of Binx's [though Ventura's from Brooklyn and spent years in LA, he lives now in Lubbock, and whatever else Texas is, it seems to be his voice's best home]). These are columns about America, in all the big and small ways—the fattening of the place, the wild careeners who follow their own call and are redeemed by the search, the moneyed farce that is politics, all of it. They're about cars and rebels, about home and friends.

Of course, none of that abstract nonsense comes close to capturing what Ventura captures in his columns—and, unfortunately, snipping sentences to give a taste of the man's style doesn't remotely do him justice: "And let's remember that when the McDonald's opened, nobody put a gun to anybody's head to go there instead of to So-and-So's cafe. Choices were made, a way of life was betrayed, and nothing was ever the same." So much of the glory of Ventura's writing comes through in that passage—the bullshit-free glance that cuts through the day's stuffing to find the meat, the shameless honesty. But these words, when they all get gathered together, produce a whallop greater than you can imagine: reading Ventura's unvarnished honesty hits as it does because, after all, he's not hopeless, all's not lost. These are, yes, bleak times, and that bleakness is adequately reflected here. But there are other facets in the mirror, other things you probably haven't noticed which should give you pause, which should make you glad to be alive and aware. Ventura notices these things, writes them all down, says see, says there's more here than you've seen, than you think you know.

You'd best heed the man. Tune in to his radio. You'll be a better and changed person for it. And, for the record: this is the first book I've ever read from Texas Tech University Press, and it might be the best looking object I've seen in awhile, book or otherwise. I haven't even mentioned that, aside from the Ventura words, there are, throughout, photos from Butch Hancock, whose music is as worth your time as is this book featuring his photos. You're a fool to miss this.