The New Yorker & Me: Frazier on McMurtry; McMurtry on Frazier

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Frazier on McMurtry; McMurtry on Frazier

Reading Ian Frazier’s wonderful review of Larry McMurtry’s Thalia: A Texas Trilogy (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), I was reminded of McMurtry’s equally wonderful review of Frazier’s On the Rez (The New York Review of Books, February 10, 2000). On the Rez is one of my all-time favorite books. It tells about Frazier’s experiences among the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. McMurtry’s piece, titled “Lighting Out for the Territory,” is an excellent appreciation of it. He calls it “a complex follow-up” to Frazier’s superb Great Plains. He says of Le War Lance, one of On the Rez’s central characters,

Ian Frazier and Le War Lance begin as strangers, become friends, and end as brothers. The brotherhood they achieve is a high estate but not an easy estate. The spiritual travel involved was mainly Mr. Frazier’s; this book is the story of that pilgrimage, that is, of his effort to live up to what is best in the Sioux. And what is best in the Sioux, as he already knows from his attachment to Crazy Horse, is very good indeed. Living up to it involves a good deal of struggle and a lot of tension, as Mr. Frazier grapples with the uncertainties, inconsistencies, and inscrutabilities of life on the rez.

Frazier, in his piece, has some memorable things to say about McMurtry’s work, too. I particularly like this one: “The books in this trilogy are like songs for acoustic guitar, with maybe some chase-scene banjo thrown in.”

Frazier and McMurtry – two great writers in love with the Great Plains.