Best American Essays 1997

I read these annuals regularly from the '90s into the 2000s, even picking up the older editions back to the start in 1986. And it's still going—still under the oversight of Robert Atwan working with a different guest editor every year. This one is Ian Frazier, for example, who produced a collection that stood out to me as different from the rest. That's partly because it's one of the shortest of them all, with Frazier favoring quicker five-page pieces. He also favors humor more than most of the other editors in the series—humor always a tricky business in any literature. Not that there aren't serious pieces here—a shocking, oddly toned, and longer true-crime personal essay ("creative nonfiction") piece by Jo Ann Beard, a bitter story of gang violence by Debra Dickerson, an assessment by Susan Sontag of the state of cinema after a century, and more. My complaint about the series and the reason I finally abandoned it is that the "Best" came to seem suspect year in and year out, with a cast of too many returning writers. Frazier pointed it in a different and more interesting direction in 1997. Even though it has some of the usuals (Hilton Als, Richard Ford, Cynthia Ozick) there are lots of nice pieces that seem noticeably different from the usual fare. The first time I read this anthology, it was Beard's piece, "The Fourth State of Matter," that jumped out at me. It's still effective and quite well done, so vivid I still remembered it and thus the element of surprise was gone, and missed, alas. Luc Sante has an interesting piece about growing up in a bilingual household, with interesting details of his family history. I remember 1997 as a time when I was really taken with the personal essay. More of that view is ultimately what I think Frazier brought to his anthology. Frank Gannon's "Rat Patrol: A Saga" is an evocative memoir piece that morphs into a funny cautionary tale for parents. Dickerson's hard memories in "Who Shot Johnny?" are measured by personal grief. Lauren Slater's "Black Swans" traces her fascinating experiences with antidepressants. I want to say, to be clear, that all the Best American Essays annuals had redeeming and interesting essays that ranged broadly, as essays should—in tone, in theme, in language and style. The only difference here is that the proportion was higher for me, and there was not much I actively disliked, as could happen. Start here!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Gone to New York (2005)

This collection of pieces by Ian Frazier looks a little like one of his collections of humorous pieces. Most come from the New Yorker and most are very short, under five printed pages. But the themes and style are more like his travel books, focused on his adopted home of New York City. He moved there in the '70s to work for the New Yorker and has lived there ever since, making it his base. He has lived in lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and suburban New Jersey. He pokes at New York life in ways no one else ever seems to but that are perfectly characteristic of him. He researches how the Holland Tunnel was built in one of the longer pieces, for example, and piles on with unusual detail. In another piece, a short one, he collects comments left by people signing the registration book at a Brooklyn art museum. One continuing theme is funny in a droll New York kind of way, and that is his obsession with cleaning out plastic bags that collect in the highest branches of trees. He and a friend even design and patent a device, the "bag snagger," which they take on day trips around the city to clean. He says it replaced golf for them. Jamaica Kincaid writes an affectionate foreword—I'm not sure why, but it cheers me to find they are friends—and along the way asks perhaps the most salient question about Ian Frazier. "I asked myself, How did he do that? And that thought has never stopped occurring to me; to this day, when I read something new that he has written, I think, How did he do that?" It's true, and in addition he makes whatever it is look easy. One thing I admire and even envy is his prodigious reporting capability, which only means his willingness to sit and talk to people, ask questions, listen to the answers, and then report them out in his light and easy-rolling essays that nonetheless stay with you. And even though I have read his amazing family history more than once (Family), I don't think I ever realized before how proud he is to be from Ohio. He's careful to make sure we understand New York City—which he doesn't even love as much as Russia or the American Great Plains, let alone Ohio—is only his adopted home. It's not his real home. He's just been living there for a while. Maybe that explains why this is his slenderest travel volume. Certainly worth a look.

In case it's not at the library.

Travels in Siberia (2010)

I don't think I even suspected Ian Frazier's "Russia-love" (his term) until I finally opened this one up and started reading it recently on a long train journey, from Washington state to Minnesota and back. Travels in Siberia is typical of all Frazier's travel books, filled with a deep backdrop of book reading and long, searching, peripatetic journeying. There's little else I know quite like it, though admittedly I'm not that versed on travel literature. Siberia appears to be a state of mind as much as a huge sprawling geographical region (eight time zones! on land!), as Ian Frazier and a million others have said. I knew it was cold but I did not know it was so big. I did not understand its history or relationship exactly to Russia, so among other things I really appreciated, as always, all the lucid 'splainin' Frazier is wont to. I think I may also know at least one high school chum similarly bit by this Russia-love of Frazier's. Genghis Khan is hugely important in the Siberia region, and for once I feel like I have some understanding of the generalized historical threat, and menace, of barbarians, who rode and sacked and pillaged, etc. As much as anything a palpable sense of sadness pervades much of the writing here. Part of it is by circumstance, such as the particular ending of his long eastward journey across the region, exhausting even to read about in some of its particulars. But there's another layer of sadness I keyed into right away even on my own train journey, traveling westward across the Great Plains of North America in North Dakota and Montana, and that is the amount of environmental change we are seeing in our lifetimes. The glaciers are gone now from Glacier National Park, and have been for some time. Mt. Rainier in Washington state is losing its once massive glacier. Similar trends are evident in Siberia, of course, which Frazier is able to witness (albeit imperfectly in many ways) on four journeys between 1993 and 2009. This inevitably invites sadness. There is also some shedding of naivete—or maybe that was just my own?—in the impossible levels of corruption interlarded through every aspect of everything Frazier encounters in Russia. It really is remarkable, and disheartening. Yes, it sounds like they often have stout hearts and good spirit, and as a culture are capable of great leaps of joy and inspiration. But the corruption. Is it really the way forward? Recommended with reservations—you may have to love Ian Frazier's travel writing, as I do, to weather some of these passages. He was driven at least as batty as I would have been by even just a little of this.

In case it's not at the library.

On the Rez (2000)

The "Rez" in Ian Frazier's second book about his travels on the Great Plains of North America is the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which famously is among the most impoverished regions of the country. Le War Lance, Frazier's Native American friend he met on the streets of New York City (as detailed in Great Plains), takes an even more central role in this rambling and always interesting collection of facts and anecdotes. Frazier makes it sound as if Le is always pressing him for money. But Frazier gets something in return, as he reveals in one telling moment near the end. Le and his friend Floyd John have once again beaten Frazier out of rides and cash as they attempt to repair an ailing car. Frazier writes: "On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains." It's not that Frazier entertains and can express such a fantasy, but that he does so even in the face of all the disturbing news he has to tell about the Rez. Maybe it's the only way he can bear the reality, which is here. It's bad, and he knows it, and there's more than 100 pages of notes sourcing it all. It is heartening and yet enormously sad, enormously sad and yet heartening, to read these stories of the Oglala Sioux and the life at Pine Ridge. It's mostly bad news but not all. He finds a hero he can believe in in a teen girls' basketball player named SuAnne Big Crow. And the pathos of his plain love for the Oglala, which does verge on obsessive, is always most apparent. For me, I like how it works as a kind of sequel to Great Plains, so focused on a palpable sense of place, if here focused even more, almost exclusively, on the modern-day reservation. He continually makes it come alive in totally unexpected ways.

In case it's not at the library.

Family (1994)

Ian Frazier really does some amazing things with his memoir of his own family history. Studded as always with a stimulating array of facts that his exhaustive, painstaking research uncovers, it ties his family to the larger American project, even as it sets that larger American project into a surprisingly useful world historical context. In terms of history, religion, politics, and wider cultural issues, he offers it up all neatly tied with a nice bow. I did have some trouble and often found myself glazing over a little bit trying to follow along with the nuances—even the main threads—of some of the older family history. It reminded me some of family reunions where people are at pains attempting to elucidate all the connections and relations. Get me much beyond "cousins" and I'm lost; I don't even know exactly what "removed" means. I also found myself struggling with various corporate histories and explications, as when he describes the work his father did for Sohio. But what I loved, and there's a good deal more of this than the other, is when Frazier just lets the stories of family members' lives unfold and play out, particularly those from his own family of origin. They are wistful and sad and can become quite powerful at significant points, as when he includes love letters between his parents when they were courting, or when he reports on his family's response to the death of a sibling. Much of my interest may stem from the fact that he's only a few years older than me, hence his formative years in the '50s and '60s correspond fairly closely to mine. It's certainly interesting to get the perspective on how similar things were back then, whether it was his suburban community in Ohio or mine in Minnesota—and then on how different they have become now. As much as anything, the sense of the larger arcs of a lifetime are sad and interesting to encounter and compare to my own and those of others I know. I think I may have enjoyed the best parts of this book more my second time through, with 10 or 15 more years of living behind me. But there's also a good deal of sadness in it too, which is kind of the price you have to pay.

In case it's not at the library.

Great Plains (1989)

A revisit to Ian Frazier's first nonfiction book is almost as good as a revisit to the place he's writing about—almost. I envy Frazier's ability to make the most of his travels around that north-south band of continent just east of the Rocky Mountains. He goes out there, he stays out there, he wanders the place with determination and grace, and he meets all kinds of wonderfully fascinating people. He's oriented much the same way I am—loves Crazy Horse the historical figure to distraction, and the Crazy Horse monument in western South Dakota, still under construction (and will be for generations to come), maybe even more than me. He may or may not experience the Black Hills as holy land in quite the same way I do, but he's close. My last trip that way, in 2004, I self-consciously attempted to emulate him. But alas I was too often out of my comfort zone away from a familiar bed. I couldn't reach out and connect to others the way he can, and most disconcerting, I didn't appear to have his energy for the things writers are supposed to, such as taking copious daily notes on all of my experiences and immediate circumstances. There's very little structure here—or perhaps there's a deceptive one, because even as Frazier's chapters wander well afield of their apparent focuses, they are always extremely interesting and readable, full of nuggets of anecdote and story and studded all through with bracing arrays of facts. As if to underline the seriousness of the effort, which often feels light-hearted and desultory, the last quarter of the book is notes and sourcing and an index. It's probably worth reading but so far I've only scanned; mostly it seems to be dry business compared to the enthusiasm and rolling momentum of the text proper. For the most part Frazier gets things right, at least according to my own experience. Like him I am only a passing-through visitor to the Great Plains. I have family in western North Dakota that we visited many summers when I was growing up, but I did my growing up in Minnesota, and that's not the Great Plains. In fact, I never even began to appreciate the region until a road trip I took with a friend when I was 21, which I think of now, among other things, as my "discovery" of Montana. Something about those falling-away horizons and the vast scopes of tableau, Big Sky and railroad tracks and buttes stretching away forever in blazing sun always make my heart swell. Frazier gets that experience right on every page.

In case it's not at the library.