August 30, 2010 Issue

Ian Frazier’s incomparable way of describing things - photo-realism with an epiphanic twist - is put to the test in the stark, minimalist setting of “On the Prison Highway,” in this week’s issue of the magazine. In the piece, Frazier describes finding an abandoned Stalin-era prison camp on the prisoner-built Topolinskaya Highway in northern Siberia. He describes the camp in detail – fencing (“plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them”), barbed wire (“the ink-black barbed wire, the inch- long barbs shaped liked bayonets”), planks (“planks with the bark still on them had been fitted into the bunks so that the bark side faced down”), plaster (“It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand”). However, compared to the wrecked-house riches he encountered so often in abandoned places on the plains – junk plaster, broken crockery, cracked linoleum, old wallpaper, etc. – and described in such palpable detail in “Great Plains” (1989), the inside of the barracks of the Siberian prison camp seems stark. Frazier says, “This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held.” But as it turns out, it is the very lack of visual prompts within the barracks that shapes Frazier’s ultimate impression of the place:

“What struck me then and still strikes me now was the place’s overwhelming aura of absence. The deserted prison camp just sat there – unexcused, untorndown, unexplained. During its years of operation, it had been a secret, and in some sense it still was. Horrors had happened here, and/or miseries and sufferings and humiliations short of true horrors. ‘No comment,’ the site seemed to say.”

Often in Frazier’s writings, his explorations of absence are a form of meaning-making, whereby the close consideration of something seemingly bleak or stark like an abandoned house or a deserted prison camp yields a beautifully stated truth, an epiphany. For example, in “Great Plains,” Frazier describes an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, where, according to a roadside marker, on June 10, 1933, a family named Pritchard saw Bonny and Clyde’s car plunge into the Red River. In front of the house is an elm. On the ground under the elm, Frazier spots a “silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick.” He writes,

The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuschia Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably came here sometimes to park and make out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed to for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

How fine that “a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is. But the real felicity is in the way Frazier’s imagination moves from the lipstick to the kids who dropped it to Bonnie Parker to a feeling of his own mortality – all of this from the seemingly innocuous discovery of a tube of lipstick in the yard of an abandoned house. Frazier’s “On the Prison Highway” also contains an epiphany – one of the most profound he’s ever written, I believe. After he describes the camp’s “overwhelming aura of absence,” his thoughts turn to Stalin, the man responsible for the existence of the camp “and all the camps along this road, and the road itself.” Frazier says, “The fact that the world has not yet decided what to say about Stalin was the reason these camps were standing with no change or context; the sense of absence here was because of that.” This leads a few paragraphs later to what I call the epiphany: “Now the place existed only nominally in present time and space; the abandoned camp was a single preserved thought in a dead man’s mind.” The camp and Stalin is an obvious linkage, but the representation of the sense of absence that inhabits the camp as a thought locked in Stalin’s dead brain – that is inspired! Abandoned places stimulate Frazier’s descriptive and epiphanic powers; he knows this and that’s why – one of the reasons, anyway, in my opinion - he’s willing to go so far afield to find them.