Books discussed in this essay:

Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World
by Leah Hager Cohen
Vintage, 320 pp., $14.95 (paper)

The Last Cowboys at the End of the World: The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia
by Nick Reding
Three Rivers Press, 304 pp., $13.00 (paper)

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
by Ted Conover
Vintage, 352 pp., $14.95 (paper)

We read to leave our own lives behind for a while.  Immersed in a book, in the world reimagined for us by a writer, we can forget ourselves and learn about others.  The pull is particularly strong when those others belong to a world hidden from us but in our midst – a private clan, a for-members-only subculture to which we can only gain admission through reading.

I know the lure of subcultures, both as a reader and as a member.  I am a certified comic book geek, a dedicated Second Lifer and an occasional blogger. Heck, I even attended a Star Trek convention once.

Okay, maybe twice.

The allure of subcultures lies in their alienness, their remove from the mainstream. Fathoming the exotic, affixing it to the page for analysis and discussion, is not only one of the most powerful lures of narrative nonfiction, it’s something our discipline does particularly well. Writing about subcultures allows writers to explore human communication, connection, and custom.

Like all artists, writers are concerned with seeking out and communicating the rare, the extraordinary. But like anthropologists, writers who write about culture must then take the next step, by demonstrating the average and mundane within the rarefied realms they explore. The narrative journalist must ask herself, “Within this subculture, within this fringe, what is normal?”

In Train Go Sorry, Leah Hager Cohen’s in-depth reportage of daily life in a deaf community, the author explains how deaf American culture fits into society at large (or doesn’t), and then expands her theme to include the unique aspects of a subculture that fosters “a kind of vital warmth” among its members, the warmth of a people attempting to make sense of an often hostile world. Exploring these issues allows the author not only to illuminate one particular subculture for her readers, but also to come to grips with her own past, as the daughter of a superintendent of a New York City school for the deaf, and the quasi-insider status she enjoys among her subjects as a result.

Sometimes, as with Cohen, who reports on people she has known since she was a child, a writer’s material is familiar, right under her nose, requiring only minor adjustment on her own part. Other times, writers travel to the edges of the earth to find a subculture and subject themselves to life-altering circumstances in pursuit of the thing worth writing.

Nick Reding is one writer who fell under the spell of travel and adventure. Reding’s The Last Cowboys at the End of the World relates the fortunes, usually falling and occasionally rising, of a gaucho cowboy family of Patagonian Chile. For a privileged white American who had never saddled a horse at the narrative’s beginning, Reding quickly immerses himself in the experiences riding and roping and herding on the great pampas grasslands of central Chile’s (almost) no man’s land. Much like the figure of the devil who inhabits the anecdotes and folklore of Reding’s host family, the writer is at once a dramatic alien figure in the world of his hosts and a contributing member of the unit. Far from hugging a wall, notebook in hand, as his subjects love and hate and work and fight, Reding stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his new friends, performing ranch work and housework and childcare, and generally investing himself in the lives of his patrons.

The immersion process is taken one step further by Ted Conover, a journalist who was “embedded” in his stories long before the term took on its current wartime caché. In his pursuit of the stories of remarkable, forgotten, and marginalized populations, Conover has crossed the border with illegal immigrants and hopped freight trains with railroad hoboes. In one of Conover’s most poignant works, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, the writer chronicles his infiltration of the New York State correction officers’ corps at the infamous penitentiary, where he manages prisoners, quells tensions, and completes way too much paperwork, all to learn and write about a profession whose members, off duty, often feel they must lie and say they are in some other line of work.

Conover in dirty, suburban Ossining, New York, bears one important distinction shared by Reding in pristine, impoverished Cisnes, Chile: Both men are at the mercy of their subjects. Even when Conover isn’t outnumbered 250 to 1 by the inmates in the prison gymnasium, he and his fellow “newjacks,” green correction officers, find themselves beholden to an entrenched hierarchy of established guards occasionally prepared to crack a few skulls when the taxpayers aren’t looking. Reding, meanwhile, opens his narrative with a gripping scene in which his primary informant and closest Chilean confederate holds him at knifepoint after a night of heavy drinking. Even Cohen, early in her narrative and her own sign-language skills, is dependent upon her subjects for simple communication.

The vanishing, unromantic cowboy lifestyle Reding portrays still exists, just barely, at the fringes of Patagonian society. Many of the author’s research sources even labeled the culture as long dead (which only made our autobiographical protagonist more determined to find living gauchos). And while Conover details the lives of inmates and corrections officers, misunderstood protagonists on both sides of the law, his subjects dwell in an ethical twilight world that may give readers a visceral thrill but that few would willingly enter.

By contrast, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff illustrates the lives and experiences of an elite subculture, a pantheon of gleaming American demigods -- the Mercury astronauts of the 1960s. Master nonfiction storyteller Wolfe relates the political and practical maneuvers that fueled the twin struggles of the space race: conflict against a perceived Communist menace, and the testing of human limitation. Unlike Cohen, Conover, and Reding, Wolfe’s presence as the writer is completely absent from his book. Immersion is not Wolfe’s objective, rather, he aims to humanize a group of men who were regarded by their culture as something more than human.

But with the most benign of intentions, however, even Wolfe, a patron saint of our discipline, was unable to please everyone all the time. Über-pilot Chuck Yeager, first man to break the sound barrier and most assuredly a possessor of the fabled “right stuff,” was famously unhappy with his portrayal in Wolfe’s aeronautic opus. It’s a hard lesson for conscientious nonfiction writers: inevitably, some subjects will disagree with what the writer writes.

As if attempting to learn from Wolfe’s mistakes, in Chile, Reding scrupulously explains to every horse-bound dude he meets, almost to the point of distraction, why he is on the pampas and what he plans to do with their stories when he returns to New York. (Most of the rustics seem more concerned that he shut up and go round up the herd.) On the other end of the spectrum, Conover hides his true purpose from colleagues and inmates alike, to better preserve the authentic voices and lives he finds behind bars.

The scope of approaches used by these writers in protecting and presenting their subjects demonstrates there is no one right way to go about narrative nonfiction. In fact, the freedom offered by the lack of a governing set of rules common to a more formalized discipline such as anthropology, some might argue, is one of our genre’s strengths. The ethical guidelines for a field such as anthropology are established, teachable. Writers of narrative nonfiction, however, are bound only by a jury-rigged code composed of equal parts anthropology, journalism, common sense, and that ineffable quality known as gut instinct. It’s a sliding scale unique to each writer.

Cohen tells us that in American deaf parlance, the signed phrase “train go sorry” connotes failed connections, lapses in communication. It’s like saying someone “missed the boat.” Thankfully, the curiosity of narrative journalists keeps them present among the world’s subcultures, cataloging, interpreting, synthesizing, and communicating alien lives, so that we who read do not have to miss the boat.  For a few hundred pages, at least, we can belong to a new and mysterious clan.

AARON RAGAN-FORE is a first-year graduate student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon.