Postscript: Adam Zagajewski 1945 - 2021

Adam Zagajewski (Alamy)

I see in the Times that Adam Zagajewski died (“Adam Zagajewski, Poet of the Past’s Presence, Dies at 75”). Over the years, he contributed sixteen poems to The New Yorker. See, for example, “In the Valleys” (May 2, 2011), “Ordinary Life” (November 26, 2007), and “Karmelicka” (October 8, 2007). I know him best through his prose, particularly his memoir Another Beauty (2000). That book contains a wonderful meditation on blackbirds:

The blackbird’s song can’t be compared with art, with Bach’s arias; its sense eludes us completely, and if we listen too long, it may strike us as monotonous. For all this, though, it expresses us, it expresses human beings too. It’s a love song, and so it’s our song, the song of those who sleep and love, or loved once upon a time. What a pity that we sleep as they sing, that we aren’t there to hear it, that our ears are sunk in the pillows’ warm substance.

And to think that this frenzied concert, this extraordinary concert full of passion, provoking pity and envy, takes place each day at daybreak from March to June in every European city, London, Munich, Krakow, Arezzo, Stockholm. An unheard concert aimed straight at the sky, unreviewed, unattended, unrewarded, unpaid, with egoless artists.

The poor blackbirds sang most beautifully when no one could hear them except for policemen, milkmen (back when there were still milkmen), janitors scurrying to bureaus and offices, and of course insomniacs. Who knows, perhaps the inhabitants of those cities would be slightly different, a bit more generous, transformed somehow, if they’d heard this concert, which speaks to the human heart even though it’s intended in principle for the hearts of small songbirds alone.

When the concert had ended, as it always does, around sunrise, when daylight vanquishes the night’s intruders, silence fell, a moment of quiet, which then quickly filled with the following sound: the carefree, silly chattering of sparrows.

Reviewing Another Beauty in the May 9, 2002, New York Review of Books, Charles Simic quotes the above passage and says of the blackbirds,

The nothingness that troubles certain thinkers is not their concern. They agree to every kind of light, every kind of weather so that they may seize each moment and exist. They have no time to bother themselves with our ever-changing theories of reality; being in that moment is serious enough of a task for them. [“The Mystery of Presence”]

In the summer, red-winged blackbirds frequent a pond near where I live. Often when I see one, I think of Simic’s inspired line (“They agree to every kind of light, every kind of weather so that they may seize each moment and exist”), and remind myself to try to be more blackbird-like in my outlook. 

Pauline Kael's "The Movie Lover"

Pauline Kael (Photo by James Hamilton, 1985)

Ah, what’s this? A New Yorker piece by Pauline Kael called “The Movie Lover.” Erin Overbey includes it in her “Sunday Reading: Film Stories” (newyorker.com, March 28, 2021). I’ve never heard of “The Movie Lover.” I read the first sentence – “I’ve been lucky” – and instantly recognized it as the opening of the Introduction to her great 1994 collection For Keeps. I’ve read this Introduction many times; it’s one of my favorite Kael pieces. I didn’t know that it first appeared in The New Yorker as “The Movie Lover.” It’s a wonderful essay, in which Kael reflects on the genesis of her writing style – what she calls “that direct, spoken tone.” She says,

A friend of mine says that he learned from reading me that “content grows from language, not the other way around.” That’s a generous way of saying that I let it rip, that I don’t fully know what I think until I’ve said it. The reader is in on my thought processes.

Yes, she let it rip. That’s what I love about her writing. Take her superb “The God-Bless-America Symphony” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978), a review of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Reading it, you sense Kael grappling with this “astonishing piece of work,” trying to sort out her responses. Finally, near the end, she lands on this perception: 

Michael shows no physical desire for Linda. They lie on a bed together, he fully clothed – should we know what they’re thinking? We don’t. And when, for one night, they’re under the covers together, without their clothes, and he rolls over on top of her, the scene is deliberately vague, passionless. He never even kisses her – would that be too personal? He was hotter for the deer.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. I’ll bet Kael smiled, too, as she wrote it. She loved wisecracks, and that’s one of her best. And it gets at the essence of her take on The Deer Hunter – “a romantic adolescent boy’s view of friendship, with the Vietnam War perceived in the Victorian terms of movies such as Lives of a Bengal Lancer – as a test of men’s courage.” 

March 22, 2021 Issue

I like this sentence: “It’s demeaning, to be served this ham, but no amount of recoiling changes the fact that ‘Ginny & Georgia’ is mirroring a mode of cavalier speech on social media that compresses the ineffability of identity into a checklist of outwardly visible bona fides: what one eats, where one was raised, how well one twerks.” It’s from Doreen St. Felix’s capsule review of “Ginny & Georgia,” in this week’s “Goings On About Town.” That last phrase – “how well one twerks” – makes me smile. I have no intention of watching “Ginny & Georgia.” But I love St. Felix’s writing. Three of her pieces made my “Best of 2018: newyorker.com”: “Deana Lawson’s Hyper-Staged Portraits of Black Love,” March 12, 2018 (“Flickers of the couple’s personality are awakened and then drowned out by the eye that posed these subjects just so”); “The Eerie Anonymity of a Show of African-American Portraiture at the Met,” July 19, 2018 (“The images are corralled into common memory, a process that risks degrading the subjects’ vital and specific personhood”); and “The Photographer Who Captured How Whiteness Works in the American South,” December 1, 2018 (“Looking at the stiffened old black couple standing on opposite ends of their doorway, emanating all the vitality of a Victorian corpse portrait, I wonder what alchemical effect Fox Solomon has on her black subjects in their black spaces. It’s one that seems to be built not on trust but on more candid, and more revealing, forces: secrecy and distance. The saxophonist clutches his instrument and glares, judgy, wary. Fox Solomon’s scenes telegraph the well-earned feelings of prejudice that blacks had toward photography and its threatening ability to reduce them to totems”).

March 15, 2021 Issue

Art is where you find it. Adam Iscoe finds it in the most unlikely places. In “Under the Hood” (January 25, 2021), he visits a tow-impound yard (“Three balding men from Staten Island reviewed a list of Vehicle Identification Numbers neatly written on a sheet of notebook paper; a tow-truck driver explained the difference between numerators and denominators to his daughter; a South Brooklyn scrap-yard boss kibbitzed with his competition, a younger man from the Bronx. A guy sitting on the curb, repairing his sneakers with rubber cement, eavesdropped”). In “The Smell Test” (March 1, 2021), he observes a K-9 inspection (“Nearby, a woman wearing spandex leggings and a ripped jean jacket shouted, ‘Yay! I don’t have COVID,’ and a wobbly man, who smelled of Bud Light, said, ‘I think this is dumb as fuck, and you can quote me on that’ ”). 

Now, in “Back at It,” in this week’s issue, Iscoe describes the reopening of a movie theatre (“An employee with long green and blue fingernails yawned into her elbow”). The piece ends terrifically with the popping of thirty-five pounds of popcorn:

Quintana, a five-year veteran of the concession stand, wandered behind the candy counter. He found a thirty-five-pound bag of popcorn kernels in a storage closet. “At one point during the pandemic, I bought popcorn, just to try to relive the experience,” he said, as he poured buttery salt powder along with the kernels into a popcorn machine. “It wasn’t the same.” A minute later: pop-pop-pop. “Yeah, this is it,” he said. Pop-pop-pop. “This is movie-theatre popcorn!”

I enjoy Iscoe’s work immensely. 

March 8, 2021 Issue

Normally I’m allergic to play-based movies. I find them static, airless, boxed-in. One exception is Mike Nichols’ Closer (2004), starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, and Julia Roberts. There’s an excellent capsule review of it by Anthony Lane in this week’s “Goings On About Town.” Lane writes,

Patrick Marber adapted his own hit play of the same name, and gave a lucky director, Mike Nichols, a script that he could chew on. Peel away the carnal talk and what’s left—the bone structure of the piece—resembles Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” We get two interlocking couples: Dan (Jude Law), a writer who falls in love with Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper, and Larry (Clive Owen), a doctor who marries a photographer named Anna (Julia Roberts). The transactions are quick and brutal: Dan has anonymous online sex with Larry and a yearlong affair with Anna, Alice leaves Dan and starts working at a night club, Larry finds her there and tells her precisely what he wants, and nobody is happy. The film is more civilized than the play, the acid slightly diluted, and Law, for one, looks eaten away by the bitter pace of it all. Roberts, too, is haunted and pained, whereas Portman and Owen drink and spit their lines with undiminished relish, often at speeds that Nichols can barely handle.

That “The film is more civilized than the play, the acid slightly diluted, and Law, for one, looks eaten away by the bitter pace of it all” is very good. It’s a new line; it doesn’t appear in the review of Closer that Lane wrote seventeen years ago: see “Partners” (The New Yorker, December 13, 2004). The earlier piece has its pleasures, too, e.g., “People share here, but they share betrayals and bodily fluids as if they were viral strains,” and “Larry’s gibes are guided like missiles, and the meanest of them is unanswerable: ‘You writer.’ ”

 Lane’s reviews spur me to see this great Nichols film again.

Approaches to Writing: McPhee v. Klinkenborg

John McPhee and Verlyn Klinkenborg, two of my favorite writers, approach composition quite differently from each other. McPhee is a structuralist. He always starts by making a plan, conceptualizing his entire piece in outline. In his Draft No. 4 (2017), he says, “I always know where I intend to end before I have much begun to write.” Klinkenborg is an anti-structuralist. He’s against outlines. In his Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012), he says,

You’re more likely to find the right path –
The interesting path through your subject and thoughts –
In a sentence-by-sentence search than in an outline.

Who is right? I can see the merits of McPhee’s structuralism. But Klinkenborg’s sentence-by-sentence search appeals to me, too. Neither writer is dogmatic about his method. McPhee says, “What counts is a finished piece, and how you get there is idiosyncratic.” Klinkenborg says, “You decide what works for you.” 

Composing these ephemeral blog notes, I find I’m more Klinkenborg than McPhee. One point both writers agree on is the importance of following your interests. McPhee says, “I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me.” Klinkenborg says, “Start by learning to recognize what interests you.” That is one of this blog’s main aims.

Svetlana Alpers' "Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch"

I’m a fan of Walker Evans’s photography. I first encountered it forty years ago when a friend gave me a slim, elegant volume of Evans’s photos published by Aperture – #10 in its series Masters of Photography. I’m also a fan of Svetlana Alpers’ writing. I first encountered it in 1983, when I read her superb The Art of Describing. Both these items – Evans’s photography and Alpers’ writing – come together deliciously in Alpers’ new book Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. It’s a study of the way Evans made his pictures. It moves sagaciously, omnivorously through Evans’s oeuvre, starting with his brilliant Corrugated Tin Façade, Moundville, Alabama (1936), looping back to his first pictures (e.g., Girl in Fulton Street, New York, 1929), then proceeding chronologically through his work (Interior Detail of a Portuguese House, Vagrant in the Prado of Havana, Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, and many, many more) right up to his death in 1975, tracking the development of his style. 

Ah, yes, Evans’s incomparable style – how to describe it? Alpers shows the way. She says of his Girl in Fulton Street:

But it was the woman on Fulton Street who caught Evans’s eye – a more firmly stationed version of the one in France, face three-quarter viewed, head defined by a fitted black cloche, coat marked by a large fur collar and muff. A strip of three negatives (unfortunately not numbered) leaves a trail of Evans’s pursuit. Both she and he hold still (he here with a small camera), while men wearing fedora hats move by and in between. Evans was attracted to reflections in the window glass behind her, the rising diagonal of the crane near her head, the sign with the letter R, more bits of sign over the window and the lettering SPAGHETTI above her head. The reflecting band widens and wanes, faces and hats come in between, and finally he gets his shot. In the mid-sized reflection there is a building, the figure of a hatted man and things not quite possible to read. To capture it all he sacrificed the sign with letters spelling out SPAGHETTI, but he retained its lower frame above her head.

Not content to just describe, Alpers also analyzes:

It is hard to put one’s finger on what is so remarkable here, but it is worth trying because the elements occur again and again in Evans’s work. First, there is the distant take he has on a woman seen. Her power is in her presence – the set look of the features and her costume. Given the formality of his address she seems not simply dressed, but in costume. He does not probe further. He likes what he sees and lets her be. There is a resistance to judge or intervene in any way. That holding back, that keeping his distance, is a great skill. I could say (and I do believe) that that is the basis to the nature of photography. But indeed it is Evans with the camera. She is still while around her swirls the world. – Fulton Street, the city. The swirl is provisional, thrown together from pieces of steel, iron, glass, cloth, stone. And her presence holds out, as it were, against the world. Surely when he saw the woman the periphery also caught his eye.

I find such descriptive analysis thrilling. Alpers’ book brims with it.

Walker Evans, Girl in Fulton Street, New York (1929)

But Alpers also makes some questionable statements. For example, in the Preface, she says, “First of all, photographs are not singular.” Later in the book, she contradicts herself. She says of Evans’s famous portrait of Ellie Mae Burroughs (Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936), “Evans’s photograph of Burroughs is a singular image, though not a portrait of someone great. How is it singular? How did that come about?” 

She continues,

Attempts to explain it have dwelt on the special encounter between the photographer and his subject. Evans with his 8 x 10 view camera stood less than three feet away from the serious, gaunt woman backed up against the clapboard wall of her house. She takes her place before the camera and establishes herself as a subject in her own right rather than serving as an object before Evans’s camera. That makes the singularity of the woman in the photograph a matter of relationship – photographer and subject rather than photographer and object. It was famously praised in those terms by Lionel Trilling.

Surely, Alpers is right about the Burroughs portrait; it is singular. And so are Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931), Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania (1935), and many, many other Evans images. So it strikes me as a curious thing to say, at the beginning of her book, that photographs aren’t singular, when the rest of her text argues they are. 

Another questionable observation she makes is “An essential quality of a great photograph is that it makes the world strange.” Really? What is strange about Evans’s photos? Alpers appears to define “strange” in terms of either surrealism or abstraction. She says, “Though we have become used to them in the almost two centuries since their invention, photographs are visually unexpected and strange in nature. Surreal is a default of photography.” A few lines later, she adds, “Another default of photography on exhibit at Levy’s gallery during those years was abstraction.” But later, she contends that Evans avoided surrealism and abstraction:

The surreal and the abstract are defaults for the camera. They are seductive moves for a photographer. Neither surrealism nor abstraction was a possibility of the medium for Evans. They were seductions that he avoided.

So in what way are Evans’s photos strange? I question Alpers’ premise. Not all photographers make the world strange. Many – Evans included, I’d argue – are just out to show the world as it is. Evans’s style is nothing if not matter-of-fact. I find it difficult to square his factual style with a word like “strange.” Maybe I’m just hung up on the word. “Strange” to me means peculiar, weird, odd, bizarre. Evans’s photos don’t strike me as any of those things. But as soon as I say that, I recall Geoff Dyer’s wonderful reading of Evans’s Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931):

And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems, for the street looks like it might not be a street and could actually pass for a canal or river. Asked, rhetorically, what he most loves Joseph Brodsky replies, unhesitatingly, “Rivers and streets – the long things of life.” Evans’s photo is the representation of this longed for elision. Not so much parked as moored, the cars seem oddly amphibious. The trees have something of the watery melancholy of weeping willows. There is a touch of Venice or Amsterdam about the scene. You feel that if you wanted to cross this wet road a bridge would come in handy. The impression of a street as waterway is enhanced by the way it kinks, bends, before dissolving not in countryside or suburbs but into a damp mist that might be the sea. The carefully incremented details – cars, trees, buildings – fade and recede into an unfathomable, indistinct mass of grey. That’s when you realize that although it may be a picture of a street that looks like a river, its real subject is time. And it was not quite right to say that “to look at this photograph is to walk down the street shown in it.” More accurately – and even more remarkably – it is to have walked down it, before returning to one’s room at the United States Hotel and looking down at the rain-slick street. [The Ongoing Moment, 2005]

Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931)

And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems … – So there you go, I’ve contradicted my own argument. Perhaps every photo, if looked at closely enough, imaginatively enough, appears strange. I just wish Alpers had elaborated a bit more on what she means by “making the world strange,” especially in view of her ruling out, in Evans’s case, both surrealism and abstraction. 

Another curious statement made by Alpers is that “It is in the nature of a photograph by Evans, that a story is promised.” I’m not sure about that. Later in the book, Alpers quotes John Szarkowski as saying, “Intuitively, he [the photographer] sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned toward symbol.” Incapable of narrative – this is closer to my own view of Evans’s photos. I see them as images – pure images – not stories, not symbols – images that stand for themselves. It seems to me that Alpers eventually swings around to this viewpoint when she says, “Put succinctly, a photograph by Evans is seeing and (in my own words) also telling. The word telling used here not so much as in ‘to tell a story,’ but as in 'having a striking or telling effect.' ” 

So these are some of the questions arising from my reading of this absorbing book. But they’re mere quibbles compared to the many satisfactions it affords. This book helped me grasp why I love Evans’s photos so much. It abounds in illuminating observations. For example:

Keep in mind his taste for tin. It was a humble American material and attracted Evans’s eye.

But finding the right place to stand, the right view, is the heart of the matter for Evans.

It is not only the look of his photographs that is classic, but also their making.

The flatness and right-angled structure of buildings built from over-lapping strips of wood painted white or left bare are the American county churches and houses of Evans’s photographs. Not thick halls of marble, but thin walls of wood. Evans’s level, centered, straight-on photography is at one with that aesthetic.

Reading Flaubert sharpens our looking at Evans.

Evans repeatedly does re-takes on Atget – mirrors, carts, the wild cactus in Truro seen in one of the interiors favored for a lifetime by Evans and before by Atget.

Evans made the expected photographs of a much-admired, new modern house, but preferred to photograph an old fisherman. 

Evans had a taste for brooms in his interiors. There is a sense in which, metaphorically, they emphasize the clean style of his photographic address.

The finest photographs are the tightest and leanest.

Following Evans along the trail of photographs made, reproduced, admired, and written about is different from following the trail of the life.

To me, it seems likely that it was something simpler, more basic: that in the strange, withdrawn state of the individuals down in the subway he found versions of himself.

Forget the vernacular as such for its own sake, what interests him is the beauty of what, in a dense phrase, he describes as (let me repeat) the esthetically rejected object.

At the end of the day and of his life, the photographer for us to turn to when we look at how Evans approached the end is Eugène Atget.

I admire Alpers’ writing immensely. She lets the reader in on her thought processes. Her analytical moves are dazzling. “Let us begin with three Cuban photographs and see where they lead,” she says, and I’m right there with her, happy to tag along.

My favorite sentence in Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch occurs during Alpers’ description of Evans’s great Moving Truck and Bureau Mirror, Brooklyn, New York (1929-31). Noting the “tightly knit jumble of things captured by Evans’s photograph,” she says, “It is the Flaubertian airlessness of the cactus at Truro all over again.”

The book is beautifully produced, with a gallery of 143 Evans photos at the front. Each photo is numbered, and the number helpfully appears in the margin of the text, whenever a photo is discussed. Time and again, I found myself using this feature to quickly flip back to the portfolio, looking afresh at the pictures in light of Alpers’ insightful commentary. 

March 1, 2021 Issue

This week’s issue is a cornucopia of great reading. Zach Helfand’s “Vaccine Yenta,” Adam Iscoe’s “The Smell Test,” Dana Goodyear’s “Viewfinder,” Nick Paumgarten’s “It’s No Picnic,” Alex Ross’s “Wind Songs,” Peter Schjeldahl’s “Mastering Sorrow” – all terrific. So let’s have a contest. Here’s a choice passage from each. Which one’s the most inspired?

1. Later that afternoon, at a vaccination center in a gymnasium in the Bronx, Helen Mack—seventy-six, hand-sewn mask (four-ply), Ruvkun bookee, nervous but sufficiently prayed for—didn’t look when the needle went in. “It’s over?” she said. “I didn’t even feel it! Thank the Lord! It’s over!” [Zach Helfand, “Vaccine Yenta”]

2. A fireball danced on the Jumbotron, and a man holding a big cardboard cutout of Baby Yoda bellowed with something like joy. [Adam Iscoe, “The Smell Test”]

3. Her conveyance is Vanguard, a careworn white van, its headlights searching out a new future, everything bungee-corded down. [Dana Goodyear, “Viewfinder”]

4. At Hamido, the evening was mild, and the curve was still more or less flat; happy to be around people other than our families, we sat at a large table on the sidewalk, in the open air, sharing platters of bran-grilled orate, grilled octopus, fried sardines, baba ghanoush, and beers of our own bringing. Was all of this reckless? Probably. But we are nothing if not weak. [Nick Paumgarten, “It’s No Picnic”]

5. Microtonal tunings, electronic processing, and rough string attacks engender ferocious climaxes. [Alex Ross, “Wind Songs”]

6. Rapid clips from Black history and daily life, ranging from violent scenes of the civil-rights movement to children dancing, possess specific, incantatory powers. Their quantity overloads comprehension—so many summoned memories and reconnected associations, cascading. The experience is like a psychoanalytic unpacking, at warp speed, of a national unconscious regarding race. [Peter Schjeldahl, “Mastering Sorrow”]

And the winner is … Alex Ross’s “Microtonal tunings, electronic processing, and rough string attacks engender ferocious climaxes.” I have a weakness for zero-article constructions. Ross’s is a beauty. 

3 for the Road: Ian Frazier's "Great Plains"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Great Plains. 

Frazier’s book chronicles his Great Plains rambles of the 1980s. And man, does he ramble! He clocks twenty-five thousand miles on his van, driving up, down, and across “that immense Western short-grass prairie now mostly plowed under.” He noses around countless dusty, little towns, seeing what there is to see, noting down detail after extraordinary detail. In Strasburg, North Dakota, he looks inside the Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church:

There was a smell of polished wood, hymnals, and rubber floor-mats. The empty air was still vibrating slightly with the suppressed fidgets of children. Except for the pews and the floors, almost every interior surface was covered with statues or paintings. Two girl-sized statues of angels holding fonts of holy water stood by the main door. The tall, narrow windows each had a saint in stained glass. Angels and biblical scenes covered the ceiling. The altar had a crucified Christ in the center, statues of the Virgin Mary, St. Anne, St. Peter, St. Paul, the Last Supper, candles, scrolls, filigrees, more angels – a scene as colourful and crowded as the finale of the Radio City Easter Show. All the vents at the bottoms of the windows were open. At the front of the church, Emerson Seabreeze electric fans on wheeled stands faced the congregation.

Near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, he visits a rock shop “made entirely of fossilized dinosaur bones.” On the banks of the Sun River, in western Montana, he sits inside a “medicine wheel” (“The hooves of cattle going down to the water have trampled out most of the wheel’s center”). In the valley of the Madison River, also in western Montana, he stops at the Madison Buffalo Jump State Monument (“On the spot where so many buffalo would have landed and died, almost no grass grows, maybe out of tact”). Just outside the town of Holcomb, in western Kansas, he pulls into the driveway of the house where the Herb Clutter family was murdered one night in 1959, and where, later, Truman Capote came to research In Cold Blood (“The history of this house makes everything here look different; it makes warm afternoon sunshine into the flash of a police photographer’s camera”). On the open prairie in west-central Montana, near no town, he encounters what he calls “perhaps my favourite ruin on the Great Plains” – a massive steel-and-concrete structure that was once a command center for the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile system. He writes, “As my van rocks gently on its springs in the wind, and as the wind whistles through the grama grass, I feel as if the car and the grass and I are all flesh to this ruin’s bone.”

Frazier’s most profound Great Plains epiphany occurs in Nicodemus, Kansas, population about fifty, founded by black homesteaders. Arriving there, he finds the town in the middle of its annual Founders’ Day Weekend celebration. At the township hall, Frazier attends a program, including a fashion show of ladies hats: 

The hats were big, in dramatic shapes, burgundy and gray and black and white. Mrs. Avalon Roberson modelled them. She put on each hat and strolled around the room so everybody could see it. She got applause all the way around. Then Mrs. Jaunita Robinson, of Nicodemus, introduced her daughters Kathleen, Karen, Kaye, Kolleen, Krystal, and Karmen. Her other daughter, Kimberleen, who was pregnant, watched from the audience. First, Karmen, wearing (Juanita Robinson told us) a white suit with a slit skirt, a navy handkerchief, a black-and-white blouse, white ankle boot with a chain on the side, and a black-and-white hat with a veil, walked to the middle of the floor and stood with her left hand on her hip and her face turned to the side. Then Krystal, wearing a white lace dress, a white lace coat with balloon sleeves, and a white hat with navy lining and a veil, came and stood next to her sister the same way. Then came Kolleen, in a casual dress with black-and-off-white-striped pockets on the side, white nylons, black shoes, and a black hat. Then Karen, in a two-piece red suit, a white lace blouse, a red hat with a veil, and white shoes. Then Kathleen, in a purple silk dress with black stripes, a black hat, and black shoes. Then Kaye, in a black-and-blue triangle dress, a black belt, black shoes, blue nylons, and a black hat. When they were all lined up, they held that pose for a moment. Then the song “When Doves Cry,” by Prince, began to play on the loudspeaker, and they began to dance. I looked past the people sitting on chairs against the wall, the women with their pocketbooks on their knees, past the portrait of Blanche White, who was like a mother to the kids in the town, through the tall open window, past the roadside grove of elms which Blanche White’s 4-H Club planted in the 1950s, past the wheat-field horizon, and into the blank, bright sky. Suddenly I felt a joy so strong it almost knocked me down. It came up my spine and settled on my head like a warm cap and filled my eyes with tears, while I stood there packed in with everybody, watching Mrs. Robinson’s lovely daughters dance.

Wow! That, for me, is one of the most thrilling, uplifting, bravura passages in all of literature. It’s like an aria, moving from very detailed, exact description to a moment of pure joy that soars above the scene, “through the tall open window, past the roadside grove of elms which Blanche White’s 4-H Club planted in the 1950s, past the wheat-field horizon, and into the blank, bright sky.” 

Great Plains is a brilliant epiphanic journey across a land that is “like a sheet Americans screened their dream on for awhile and then largely forgot about.” It takes you to Sitting Bull’s cabin on the Grand River; to a black-powder rendezvous at Bent’s Fort; to a Wyoming Ranch for a cattle roundup. It puts you squarely there with Crazy Horse, in the jail at Fort Robinson, when he’s fatally stabbed. 

Sometimes Frazier sleeps in his van; sometimes he stays in motels. He writes, “A the edge of a little town, I pulled off the road, took off my shoes, moved some stuff from the mattress, and fell asleep, the gasoline still sloshing back and forth gently in the tank.” I love that sentence – matter-of-fact reporting with just the right touch of lyrical detail. Great Plains brims with such lines. Here’s another: “The first snow storm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.” And another: “A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara.” If you relish sentences like that, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Great Plains.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of these books – their action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, use of figuration – in more detail. My next post in this series will be on structure.