October 25, 2010 Issue

There are two dandy pieces in this week’s issue of the magazine: Ian Frazier’s “Fish Out Of Water,” and Tad Friend’s “Blowback.” I enjoyed them both immensely. “Fish Out Of Water” finds Frazier in Rust Belt country, moseying along the Illinois River, checking out the carp fishing. The story contains some wonderful details: “low-lying parking lots full of river mud cracked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle”; “carp of mint-bright silver”; “Confederate-flag halter tops.” There’s a memorable description of an event called the “Redneck Fishing Tournament,” which contains this inspired sentence: “Crushed blue-and-white Busch beer cans disappeared into the mud, crinkling underfoot.” Here’s another great sentence from later in the story: “Through waving weedbeds of bureaucracy and human cross-purposes, the fish swim.” My response to the story was double. I learned about the Asian-carp invasion and I soaked up Frazier’s delightful prose. The Ralph Steadman illustration accompanying Frazier’s piece is also terrific.

One of the few New Yorker writers in Frazier’s league is Tad Friend. His style is different from Frazier’s. Frazier is a poet of “bleak,” whereas Friend is more a celebrant of suburban bosk. For example, in this week’s “Blowback,” he takes us to Orinda, California, where “the stands of live oaks, valley oaks, pines, redwoods, and mulberries are all as artificial as Lake Cascade, which was created in the nineteen-twenties to irrigate the local golf course.” And he describes a fascinating event called a “‘No Blow’ summit and barbecue” on the Kendall family’s back deck, overlooking Lake Cascade. Reading Friend’s brilliant piece, I experienced the same blissful double response that I’d enjoyed reading Frazier’s article. I related to the issue, namely, the noisy menace of leaf blowers; and I loved the specificity of the writing, particularly sentences such as this one: “He donned his Echo PB-500T backpack blower and earmuffs and blew off the driveway, corralling the leaves into a mound for his two colleagues to collect.”