March 31, 2025 Issue

Anytime Richard Brody comments on Pauline Kael – beware! He doesn’t like her. His hostility goes back to his “Shoah at Twenty-Five” (December 7, 2010), in which he comes perilously close to calling Kael anti-Semitic because she dared to criticize Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In this week’s issue, Brody has a “Takes” piece that revisits Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” (January 23, 1971). He appears to praise it. But don’t be fooled. His knife is out. He calls it “something of a manifesto” that “reveals why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.” He notes “the rise of the New Hollywood era that Kael would celebrate as a golden age,” and says, “she was hostile to many of its masterworks.” This is false. For one thing, “Notes on Heart and Mind” is not “something of a manifesto,” not even close. It’s a collection of rants she wrote out of frustration with how bad the movies were at that time. If you want to read her manifesto, read “Trash, Art and the Movies” (1969) – one of the great critical essays of the twentieth century. 

But the main reason Brody’s claim is false turns on his use of “many” (“she was hostile to many of its masterworks”). Okay, name one. Name one masterwork of the New Hollywood era, the so-called golden age of American cinema, that Kael was hostile to. I can think of at least a dozen that she celebrated: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Phantom of the Paradise, The Godfather, Part II, Shampoo, Nashville, Carrie, Taxi Driver. Kael wasn’t at odds with these revolutionary new American movies. She loved them!

The “Takes” series invites New Yorker writers to “revisit notable works from the archive.” Brody’s choice of Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” is odd. It’s one of her weakest pieces. She wrote it when she was in a funk. She included it in her final collection For Keeps (1995), but she cut it drastically. With so many great Kael reviews and essays to choose from, why did Brody pick this one? I think it goes back to his hatred of her Shoah review. He’s exacting his revenge. 

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Structure

This is the fourth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their structure.

The Pine Barrens and The Meadowlands are structured thematically. On the Rez flows more or less chronologically, with timeouts for historical perspective. The Pine Barrens consists of nine chapters. Each chapter has a particular theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. The Woods from Hog Wallow	Tells about Fred Brown, a seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native, who lives in a shanty in the heart of the forest. “Come in. Come in. Come on the hell in.” Brown accompanies McPhee on road trips through the pines. “As the car kept moving, bouncing in the undulations of the sand and scraping against blueberry bushes and scrub-oak boughs, Fred kept narrating, picking fragments of the past out of the forest, in moments separated by miles....”
2. The Vanished Towns	Tells about the vanished towns of the Pine Barrens, e.g., Martha Furnace (“With the exception of the furnace mound, there is not a trace of a structure in Martha now. The streets are bestrewn with a green and blue glittering slag, but they are indistinguishable from the sand roads that come through the woods from several directions to the town, and if it were not for the old and weirdly leaning catalpa trees, it would be possible to pass through Martha without sensing its difference from the surrounding woodland”).
3. The Separate World	Tells about the people of the Pine Barrens – their work, their isolation, and their “live and let live” spirit. “The sphagnum-blueberry-cranberry-wood-charcoal cycle was supplemented in other ways as well – most notably in December, when shiploads of holly, laurel, mistletoe, ground pine, green briar, inkberry, plume grass, and boughs of pitch pine were sent to New York for sale as Christmas decorations.
4. The Air Tune	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ distinctive place names, names of plants and flowers, and folktales. “There is a plant in the Pine Barens that has velvety, magical leaves to which water absolutely will not adhere. The pineys call it neverwet.”
5. The Capital of the Pines	Tells about Chatsworth, the principal community in the Pine Barrens. McPhee visits Chatsworth General Store: “When I first stopped in there [Chatsworth General Store], I noticed on its shelves the usual run of cold cuts, canned foods, soft drinks, crackers, cookies, cereals and sardines, and also Remington twelve-gauge shotgun shells, Slipknot friction tape, Varsity gasket cement, Railroad Mills sweet snuff, and State-Wide well restorer. Wrapping string unwound from a spool on a well shelf and ran through eyelets across the ceiling and down to a wooden counter.”
6. The Turn of Events	Tells about three major events in Chatsworth’s history: the Chatsworth Fire, in 1954; the crash and death in the woods, in 1928, of an aviator who was known as Mexico’s Lindbergh; and a visit, in 1927, by S.E. il Principe Constantino di Ruspoli, an authentic Italian prince who happened to be a native of Chatsworth.
7. Fire in the Pines	Tells about the Pine Barrens’ high susceptibility to fire. “A remarkably common cause of fire in the pines is arson. Standing in all that dry sand, the forests glisten with oils and resins that – to some people – seem to beg for flame.”
8. The Fox Handles the Day	Tells about various animals and plants that are native to the Pine Barrens. “Twenty-three kinds of orchids grow in the Pine Barrens – including the green wood orchid, the yellow-crested orchid, the white-fringed orchid, the white arethusa, the rose pogonia, and the helleborine – and they are only the beginning of a floral wherewithal that botanists deeply fear they will someday lose.”
9. Vision	Tells about a plan to construct a jetport and city in the Pine Barrens. “We moved on to see the site of the jetport, which would cover thirty-two thousand five hundred acres and would eliminate virtually all of the Upper and Lower Plains, several ponds, a lake, an entire state forest, and Bear Swamp Hill.”

The Meadowlands is similarly structured – eleven chapters, each with its own theme. Here’s a table showing each chapter’s title and subject:

1. Snake Hill	Tells about the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall rock that “sticks out of the very middle of the Meadowlands like a geological mistake.” “At the top, I can see for miles. To the north and west, a low ridge contains the area like a bowl with a lip made of little cities and towns. To the east, I can still see the Manhattan skyline, only now it is not shouting but whispering from behind another ridge. To the south, I can see out past the refineries and their towers of smoke and flame, out past the boat-loading cranes that feed along the cargo-containered fields of the Port of Newark like huge dark insects, out toward the Atlantic Ocean.”
2. An Achievement of the Future	Tells about various plans for development of the Meadowlands, e.g., futuristic theme park, industrial city, giant dairy farm. “People were always trying to invent new uses for the Meadowlands; most people felt anything was better than what was there.”
3. Gone with the Wind	Tells about Sullivan’s exploration of the Meadowlands town of Kearny, e.g., his visit to the Kearny Library, where he views the world’s largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind.
4. Walden Swamp	Tells about two canoe trips into the Meadowlands that Sullivan took with his friend Dave. “Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into the trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.”
5. Valley of the Garbage Hills	Tells about the Meadowlands’ dumps. “One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark.”
6. Skeeters	Tells about attempts to control the swarms of Meadowlands’ mosquitoes. “Touring mosquito-infested areas of New Jersey with Victor is like touring a red-light district with a vice squad detective.”
7. Treasure	Tells about canoeing the Meadowlands with Leo Koncher, searching for treasure. “Leo Koncher is always searching for something when he goes out on expeditions into the swamp. One thing he searches for is a relic of one of the old plank roads that once crossed the Meadowlands. Specifically, he looks for remnants of the old road from Jersey City to Belleville.”
8. Digging	Tells about people and things buried in the Meadowlands, e.g., Jimmy Hoffa. “The morning that Dave and I set out to dig for Jimmy Hoffa was beautiful and sunny, and as we drove through Jersey City, we got lost and circled underneath the Pulaski Skyway a couple of times and wondered for a brief moment if a van full of Korean churchgoers might be following us.”
9. Bodies	Tells about exploring the Meadowlands with a retired detective from Kearny named John Watson. “Watson has a voracious appetite for all facts pertaining to the Meadowlands, facts that he is always willing to share.”
10. The Trapper and the Fisherman	Tells about two rival Meadowlands environmentalists – Bill Sheehan and Don Smith. “One day I took one of Sheehan’s eco-tours. I thought it was going to be ponderous and National Geographic special-like, but it had a good-natured feel of an afternoon on a fishing boat and I found myself hankering for a beer.”
11. Point-N0-Point	Tells about a visit that Sullivan made to the very tip of Bayonne, to the bottom of the Meadowlands, to the farthest point down he’d ever been. “On the coast of old Bayonne or in the junkyards that are on the Newark side of the sealike Newark Bay, I can’t seem to find a way in anywhere. I can’t get up the nerve to plunge into the particular breed of junkyard that grows there, through the particular kind of rubble, through the particular fields of weeds.”

On the Rez’s structure differs from the other two books. It’s more chronological. It unfolds sequentially in the order of Frazier’s visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation. It consists of fifteen untitled chapters. Two chapters – 1 and 5 – are historical. They tell the story of the Indians’ resilience in the face of mass destruction. The remaining chapters are an account of Frazier’s visits to the rez over a four-year period (1995-1999). Here’s a table summarizing what each chapter is about:

1.	Tells about Frazier’s admiration for Indians. “Of course I want to be like Indians. I’ve looked up to them all my life. When I was a young man my number-one hero was the Oglala leader Crazy Horse.”
2.	Tells about Frazier’s friendship with Le War Lance. “He calls me every week, it seems, to ask for money. It’s good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in the wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality. Sometimes when he calls, his voice is small and clear, like neat printed handwriting; other times, depending on his mood and how much he’s had to drink, his voice is sprawling and enlarged, like a tall cursive signature with flourishes on the tail letters and ink blots and splatters alongside.”
3.	Tells about Frazier’s first visit to Pine Ridge Reservation, August, 1995. “At dawn, I took a back road from Hermosa to the reservation. There was no one else about. I had the radio tuned to KILI, the Pine Ridge radio station, which broadcasts from the reservation near the village of Porcupine. It was playing Lakota singing and drumming. Under an overcast sky, the prairie looked drained of color. Here and there I saw burned patches, the black extending in tongues where the wind had pushed it. In the middle of one burned patch was a car seat, also burned. A wheel rim with shreds of tire still on it hung from a fence post. Two rows of tires lay flat on the roof of a turquoise-colored trailer, anchoring the roof against the wind. I followed the road into a wide valley, crossed a bridge over the Cheyenne River, and was on the reservation.”
4.	Tells about Frazier’s first day on the rez, traveling with Le and Floyd John, visiting various places, e.g., Big Bat’s Conoco and Wounded Knee. “We coasted down the hill to the Wounded Knee junction. Just ahead of us was a Volkswagen bus with oval license plates. It hesitantly turned left, then inched onto the drive that led up to the massacre monument and the site of the Catholic church. The driveway to the monument at America’s most famous massacre site is a deeply rutted single-lane dirt track so unpromising as to give any car owner pause. History here has had little time to reflect; it seems to be waiting for further developments, perhaps Wounded Knee III or IV.”
5.	Tells about the history of various American Indian tribes, e.g., the Kickapoo, Cherokee, Iroquois, and Navajo. “As fighters, the Iroquois were fierce. Their large and far-ranging war parties reduced to misery Indian nations as distant as the Illinois on the shores of the Mississippi, the Huron north of Lake Superior, and the Erie south of the lake that has their name. The Iroquois enjoyed torturing captives. Returning from their conquests, they usually made an event of it, with the women and children joining in. To incapacitate enemy warriors immediately after capture, the Iroquois would break the captives’ fingers with their teeth.”
6.	Tells more about Frazier’s first visit to the rez. He attends a rodeo (“The first event, the folksy rodeo announcer said, would be Mutton Bustin’, a bucking-sheep-riding contest for kids. At an end of the arena the small contestants assembled in a line, many in hats so big and pants so pegged they looked like tacks. One at a time they climbed into the bucking chutes, got aboard, and came out on sheep who flung themselves around more vigorously than I would have believed sheep could move. Some of the kids were quite little and got bucked off quickly. A few began to cry and ran for their dads to the accompaniment of the announcer’s uncomforting folksy commentary. Other kids hung on like burrs until the sheep quit bucking, and a swell of applause and honking car horns rose from the spectators”). Another afternoon, Frazier and Le visit Le’s sister Aurelia Two Crow. Another day, he, Le, and Floyd John drive to PTI Propane, south of Pine Ridge almost to the town of White Clay, to get Le’s propane fuel tank refueled. The filler hose ruptures and propane gas spews out all over. Fortunately, there’s no explosion. Frazier sees Le and Floyd John laughing. When they get in the car, Frazier asks them what they were laughing about. Le tells him they made some joke about almost getting blown up. Frazier says he doesn’t think it’s very funny. Le says, “Well, that’s the Indian way. We’d rather laugh about still being alive than moan about how we almost died.”
7.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, November, 1995. Describes the town of White Clay. “White Clay. White Clay! Site of so many fistfights, and of shootings and beatings and stabbings! Next-to-last stop of so many cars whose final stop was a crash! Junkyard, dusty setting for sprawled bodies, vortex consuming the Oglala Sioux! Sad name to be coupled with the pretty name of Nebraska! White Clay, White Clay!”
8.	Tells about the many old Indian bars in towns and cities across the U.S., many of which have vanished without a trace. Visits some of the bars that still exist, e.g., the Longhorn Saloon, in Scenic, South Dakota (“The wind-scoured South Dakota sky over the badlands was bright blue that afternoon, but in the Longhorn Saloon cigarette smoke hung thick. A column of sunlight slanting through it from a window made a luminous gray shaft above an unoccupied table piled with perhaps three dozen empty Budweiser cans”). Visits the town of Buffalo Gap, South Dakota, where there’s an old bar called the Stockman. Tells the story of the fatal stabbing of an Oglala man named Wesley Bad Heart Bull, at the Stockman (then called Bill’s Bar), January 21, 1973, and the violent intervention of the American Indian Movement in the trial of the man accused of the murder.
9.	Tells about Le’s visit to Frazier’s home in Missoula, late January, 1996. Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez soon after. On his return home, he gets in a car accident. Tells about the accident and his harrowing drive through a blizzard. “By now the snow was coming down so hard I could see only a short distance ahead, and when semis passed me, I could see almost nothing but the snow they swirled. The road was a dim blowing world in which headlights suddenly appeared in the rearview mirror and red taillights suddenly flew by and disappeared. The tape holding the windshield to the frame quickly came apart, and the windshield hung loose like a drapery, bouncing with every jolt and letting snow in to pile up on the dash.”
10.	Tells about Frazier’s next visit to the rez, summer of 1996. He attends powwow. “The men sat on metal folding chairs in a circle around the drum, hitting it hard with leather-wrapped drumsticks and singing a traditional song in loud, high-pitched unison, above which a single higher voice occasionally rose. Full dark had fallen by now, and the overhead lights had come on, but many corners of the powwow ground were half-lit or in shadow. Shadows made it hard to see all the singers’ faces. In a circle around them, intent white people watched and listened, some holding microphones to catch the sound. The observers’ faces were wide-eyed, but the singers, as they leaned into the light and back out of it, had their eyes screwed shut and their mouths wide open in song. Some of the singers held a hand to one ear to plug it, the way musicians in recording studios do. They sang at full-voice, from deep inside themselves, all of them hitting each note and word with vehemence and exactly the same time. The singing, a survival from hundreds of years ago, filled the arena and echoed to the prairie sky.”
11.	Tells more about Frazier’s 1996 summer visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Tells about his discovery of the SuAnne Big Crow Heath and Recreation Center and the room inside dedicated to the memory of SuAnne Big Crow. “At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow.”
12.	Tells about the heroic life of SuAnne Big Crow. Frazier talks with her mother, Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach, Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes, “In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.”
13.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about the 1989 state basketball tournament held in Sioux Falls, in which SuAnne scores the winning basket for Pine Ridge in the final second of the championship game. “There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.”
14.	Tells more about SuAnne Big Crow. Tells about her tragic death in a car accident, February 9, 1992. Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where the accident occurred. “After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.”
15.	Tells about Frazier’s subsequent visits to the rez, including one in December, a couple of weeks before Christmas. “At lunchtime Le went in the house and brought me out a sandwich made of a quarter-inch-thick slice of bologna on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. The sandwich had a few faint thumbprints of oil on it but was tasty anyway. I sat on an upended stove log in the sun and looked at the stuff in the yard – an armchair, a pink plastic bottle in the shape of a baby’s shoe, a pile of shingles, an old-fashioned TV antenna, beer cans, a rusting John Deere swather. Across the open field to the east, a flock of pheasants flew low and almost in a straight line. I counted twelve of them. Le took a 12-volt auto battery from the trunk of the Celebrity and sat down cross-legged by it on the ground and began to clean the battery posts with a rag. 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.

All three of these books are artfully structured. I confess I prefer On the Rez’s chronological structure slightly more. It’s more journal-like. For me, the journal structure is the most mimetic of the way real life actually unfolds. 

All three of these books contain an immense amount of action – walking, driving, canoeing. That’s the subject of my next post in this series. 

March 24, 2025 Issue

I’m struck by the first line of Arthur Sze’s “Mushroom Hunting at the Ski Basin,” in this week’s issue: “Driving up the ski-basin road, I spot purple asters.” Purple asters – my favorite wildflower. You don’t often see them mentioned in poems. They appear late in the fall – among the last wildflowers to bloom before winter arrives. I like the matter-of-factness of Sze’s first line. I like his use of first person-present tense. It’s a journal-like poem. There’s another line that appeals to me, too: “I step on dry topsoil but sense moisture beneath.” It’s a poem about mushroom-picking, obviously. I’m tempted to read more into it, read it as a call for awareness of our relationship with nature – our connection to the “unseen web of mycelium / connecting all roots and branches.” But no, leave it as is – a wonderful description of mushroom-hunting. 

Sze wrote another excellent New Yorker poem – “Looking Back on the Muckleshoot Reservation from Galisteo Street, Santa Fe” (May 26, 2008). It, too, features an inspired first sentence: “The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed / with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar, / is launched into a bay.” I love that line – so simple, yet so vivid, specific, natural. Sze is a great poet. 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #3

This is the third post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his superb Picasso and Truth (2013). It’s a description of Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932):

Touch – the imagination of contact and softness and curvature – is consumed in the Nude on Black Armchair by something else: a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding on to the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a color – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is failing. The blue wall to the left is icy cold. The woman’s blonde hair is sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast. Blacks encase her as if for eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.

I’ve chosen this passage to make a point. The word “imagination” in the first line is key. Clark is an imaginative responder to painting. He feels and thinks imaginatively. I relish his definition of “touch” – “the imagination of contact and softness and curvature.” Nude on Black Armchair is not a painting that invites your imagination to touch it, he says. Touch is “consumed by something else” – “a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property.” He sees the nude’s hand holding the white flower. He describes the flower as “clawlike.” This is imaginative description. Not everyone would see it like that. But Clark does. He’s trying to imagine his way into Picasso’s imagination. He calls the “clawlike white flower” an “emblem” of the nude’s sexual unavailability. She will “never be anyone’s property.” Fingers and petals appear “predatory.” Her body’s pale mauve is “otherworldly,” “unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone.” “The blue wall to the left is icy cold.” The woman’s blonde hair is “sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast.” Wow! Clark’s imagination is on a heater. He’s not done. “Blacks encase her as if for eternity.” And then this – the clinching line, the most inspired of all – “The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.” That line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s true, too. Look at the rubber plant. Clark says it’s a rubber plant. I believe him. Look at it. It does appear to be escaping through the window – escaping from the sleeping naked monster. It’s a strange interpretation of a strange painting. I love it. 

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932).   

March 17, 2025 Issue

I’m enjoying The New Yorker’s “Takes” series. This week, Louisa Thomas revisits John Updike’s “Hub Fan’s Bid Kid Adieu” (October 22, 1960). It’s a wonderful celebration of this brilliant piece on Ted Williams’ last game, in which, in his last at-bat, he hits a homerun. Updike describes it:

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

I love that “It was in the books while it was still in the sky.” And I love what Thomas does with it in her piece:

“It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. 

Yes, exactly. Updike did what all great artists do. He caught and preserved the moment. 

March 10, 2025 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “Dreams and Nightmares.” It’s an account of his experience in New Orleans, attending Super Bowl LIX and some of the parties and promotions leading up to it. “Eagles plus the Big Easy: I had to be there,” he says. The piece is part personal history and part reporting. Paumgarten reflects on his love of football (“I love the sport itself, the complexity of it, the variety of bodies and roles, the grace amid the peril, the sacrifice, the story lines, the religious devotion to the fate of the team and a city that’s not even my own”), his love of the Philadelphia Eagles (“The sight of the Kelly-green jerseys, against the sickly inchworm green of Veterans Stadium’s diabolical artificial turf, got its talons in me”), and his conflicted view of the Super Bowl. At times, he seems to relish the event (“It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas”). At other times, he seems to detest it (“The vulgarity and rot were palpable then, as they seem to have been, come to think of it, even when Hunter S. Thompson was in Houston for Super Bowl VIII, in 1974”). 

Paumgarten visits Media Row at the convention center (“I saw a man in a green Saquon Barkley jersey, green Eagles overalls, and green-and-silver face paint—bald but for a tight green Mohawk”). He meets up with a wealthy friend and they go to a night club called Empire (“Bouncers ushered us past the line and through the throngs inside to a table near the front”). He attends and Eagles-fan party in the Garden District (“cheesesteaks from Yinzer’s, soft pretzels, and Tastykakes”). His description of game day is detailed and vivid:

Tributaries of fans—from Bourbon and Baronne, Tchoupitoulas and Magazine—poured into Poydras Street and flowed toward the Dome. The doomsday prophets and kooks along the way brought to mind the streetside hubbub in John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces.” You had your born-agains bearing signs: “God Hates Your Idols” (possible), “Free Will Is a Satanic Lie” (true enough), “God Hates Drunks” (no, He does not), “God Hates Fags” (no), “God Hates You” (me?). A vender evaded the constabulary with his pushcart of “Donald Fucking Trump” and “Bitch I’m an Eagle” T-shirts. A group of gentlemen dressed in white, in white cowboy hats, with patches of presumably fake blood over their privates, led a protest against male circumcision, with a sign that read “Nobody Wants Less Penis.” It seemed right-wing-coded, but I couldn’t be sure. The Black Israelites, meanwhile, were out on Canal Street. Scalpers offered tickets: for a man bearing a notebook, the price was “face value.” (The average price of a ticket, on the secondary market, was sixty-five hundred dollars. The cheapest ticket was twenty-six hundred.) But there were some bargains around: you could get your face painted with your team’s colors for twenty bucks, and a Coors Light for eight.

The piece brims with wonderful, original, quasi-surreal sentences. This one, for example:

George Kittle, the San Francisco 49ers tight end, wearing a Little Caesars T-shirt adorned with pizza-slice icons, showed up with his mother at the Sports Illustrated booth—a sad little Wayne-and-Garth-calibre nook, reflective perhaps of the diminishment of both a medium and a “brand”—with boxes of Crazy Puffs.

And this:

At the Bounty House of Wingman, the hype guys lined up for free boxes of chicken wings to go with a roll of paper towels, while on a nearby patch of artificial turf civilians and pros took turns attempting to throw green Nerf footballs through downfield targets. 

“Dreams and Nightmares” is a tour de force of personal journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Interesting Emendations: Ian Frazier's "Paradise Bronx"

Sometimes a New Yorker piece appears that's been carved out of a larger work. Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Paradise Bronx” (The New Yorker, July 22, 2024) is such a piece. It comes from his recent book of the same name. Comparing the two versions, I found a number of interesting differences – some minor, some more substantive. For example, in the New Yorker piece, Frazier writes, 

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, I was stunned by the loudness of the trucks. (No other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world.) I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. 

In the book version, Frazier combines the three sentences into one:

Walking on Bruckner Boulevard one morning, stunned by the loudness of the trucks (no other borough has truck traffic like the Bronx’s, partly because its Hunts Point market, for produce, meat, and fish, is the largest food-distribution depot in the world), I also heard cars, vans, motorcycles, an Amtrak train, airplanes, and, on the lower Bronx River nearby, the horn of a tugboat pushing a barge. 

Which do you prefer? The New Yorker version is more concise, less rambling. Nevertheless, the book version appeals to me. It’s less honed, more spontaneous. 

Here’s another example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, empty and in disrepair, that John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was ten. 

Here's the book version:

On the heights above the Hudson River, in Riverdale, I found the white stucco Moorish-Dutch-style mansion, now empty and in disrepair, which John F. Kennedy moved into with his family in 1927, when he was eleven.

The New Yorker version deletes “now” and substitutes “that” for “which.” It seems slightly smoother. But what I find startling is the change in Kennedy’s age – ten in The New Yorker, eleven in the book. Which is correct? I’m betting on the New Yorker version. It’s had the benefit of the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking.

Here's another example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 825 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1953. The building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and there is no historic marker.

Here's the book version:

From the former Kennedy mansion, one can walk 4.7 miles to 815 East 179th Street, in the East Tremont neighborhood, where a twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his mother in 1952. Not only is there no historic marker, but the building that Oswald lived in no longer exists, and the address itself seems to have been abolished.

Again, the New Yorker version is smoother and more concise – more Strunk-and-White-compliant. But the book version’s extra “and the address itself seems to have been abolished” serves to emphasize the total vanishing of the Oswald address. What’s startling are the factual discrepancies: “825 East 179th Street” in the New Yorker version; “815 East 179th Street” in the book; “thirteen-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald” in The New Yorker; “twelve-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald” in the book; “1953” in The New Yorker; “1952” in the book. 

One more example. In the New Yorker version, Frazier writes,

You could swim in the Bronx River and in the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.

It's one of my favorite sentences in the piece. Checking the book version, I find it’s been lengthened to include additional details:

You could see the zoo animals over and over until you knew them by heart, swim in the Bronx River or the East River, climb the beech trees in Van Cortlandt Park, spend afternoons in a branch of the New York Public Library, sit on your fire escape and hear your neighbors’ different accents and languages coming from nearby apartments, smell five different culinary traditions wafting through your building’s stairwell at suppertime: Paradise.

Both versions are delightful. I relish the extra details in the book version. 

There are at least a dozen differences between the two texts. The New Yorker version reflects the style of New Yorker editing, with its emphasis on concision. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The New Yorker version is probably more accurate, too, due to the magazine’s rigorous fact-checking. But I also like the book version. It might be closer to Frazier’s actual voice – the singular way he thinks and expresses himself. Both versions are superb. It’s fascinating to compare them. 

March 3, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s fascinating “Shadow Warrior.” It tells about Ukrainian spy Roman Chervinsky and some of his audacious exploits. Yaffa starts with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. That story alone makes this piece worth reading. Yaffa writes,

In November, 2023, a suspect emerged. A joint investigation by Der Spiegeland the Washington Post, citing sources in both “Ukrainian and international security circles,” identified Roman Chervinsky, a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, as the operation’s alleged lead organizer. By then, Chervinsky, who had spent two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage, was under house arrest in a suburb of Kyiv. He had been charged in two separate criminal investigations, for extortion and abuse of authority, both of which he denies. Neither case, at least formally, had anything to do with Nord Stream. When I visited him recently, at his apartment, he was unequivocal about his involvement in the Nord Stream attack. “I didn’t do it,” he told me.

Note that “two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage.” Chervinsky is a bold and formidable operative, who, in person, appears to be quite ordinary. Yaffa describes him:

Chervinsky, who is fifty, with a slight frame and a head of thinning hair, wore a loose-fitting polo. An electronic monitor was affixed to his ankle. He made a pot of tea, and we sat at his kitchen table. “You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary person you could imagine standing next to on the bus that morning,” one person who has collaborated with him told me. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”

Yaffa recounts a number of Chervinsky’s adventures. One of the most memorable is the assassination of a vicious pro-Russian militant named Arsen Pavlov in an elevator in a Donetsk apartment-building. How did he do it? Yaffa tells us:

Chervinsky had another idea. He had enlisted an agent to wear a pizza-delivery uniform and to sneak into Pavlov’s building. The agent reported that Pavlov was usually accompanied by a security guard who stood watch outside Pavlov’s apartment, which was on the seventh floor. But there was one place where the pair were confined and usually alone: the elevator. Chervinsky sent two other agents—a Donetsk local and a former special-forces soldier—to Chernobyl, where, in an abandoned apartment building, they practiced the basics of the operation: prying open the doors to the elevator shaft, jumping down to the compartment’s roof, placing an explosive packet on top and a surveillance microphone in the ventilation slats, and making a quick exit. The whole sequence took about a minute. “They were motivated,” Chervinsky said. “They knew what they were doing and why.”

Back in Donetsk, the pair took up a position down the street from Pavlov’s entryway. When one of Pavlov’s guards came outside for a smoke break, the local agent—“He looked like the most peaceful guy, you’d never suspect him of anything,” Chervinsky said—caught the door before it closed. He and his partner got into the elevator shaft and out of the building without being noticed. A week later, Pavlov arrived at his building and walked inside. The agent from Donetsk called Pavlov’s cell phone and heard, via the hidden microphone, that it was ringing inside the elevator. Pavlov picked up. “Is this Arsen Pavlov?” the agent asked.

“Yes,” Pavlov replied.

“This is the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper—we’d like to interview you.” The agent pressed a button, detonating the explosives. S.B.U. officers in Kyiv had tapped Pavlov’s wife’s phone, and listened in as she frantically called her husband, who didn’t pick up.

Yaffa tells about other Chervinsky operations that are equally daring. I’m allergic to spy fiction. But Yaffa’s “Shadow Warrior” isn’t fiction. It’s real life. I found it riveting. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #4 James Wood's "Serious Noticing"

This is the seventh post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is James Wood’s “Serious Noticing,” which originally appeared in the Fall 2010 Michigan Quarterly Review. A substantially revised version is included in two of Wood’s essay collections: The Nearest Thing to Life (2015) and Serious Noticing (2019). I’ll refer to the revised version here. 

In this great piece, Wood formulates one of the most compelling theories of literature I’ve ever read. He fuses three concepts – detail, looking, and rescue. Wood relishes detail: “I think of detail as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them.” He quotes from Chekhov’s “The Kiss” and Henry Green’s Loving, and says,

Like Ryabovich [in “The Kiss”] and Edith [in Loving], we are the sum of our details. (Or rather, we exceed the sum of our details; we fail to compute.) The details are the stories; stories in miniature. As we get older, some of those details fade, and others, paradoxically, become more vivid. We are, in a way, all internal fiction writers and poets, rewriting our memories.

To exemplify what he means, Wood dips into his own memory:

I was born in 1965, and grew up in a northern English town, Durham, home to a university, a majestic Romanesque cathedral, and surrounded by coalfields, many of them now abandoned. Every house had a hearth and fire, and coal, rather than wood, was used as domestic fuel. Every few weeks, a truck arrived, piled with lumpy burlap sacks; the coal was then poured down a chute into the house’s cellar – I vividly remember the volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar, and the drifting, bluish coal-dust, and the dark, small men who carried those sacks on their backs, with tough leather pads on their shoulders.

That “volcanic sound, as it tumbled into the cellar” is wonderfully evocative.

Wood praises Chekhov’s eye for detail. He says Chekhov “appears to notice everything.” He calls him a “serious noticer.” For Wood, serious noticing is a key aspect of serious writing. He says, “In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography.” 

He invokes John Berger’s distinction between seeing and looking:

You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that “to draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.

Interestingly, Wood links noticing with metaphor. He says,

Just as great writing asks us to look more closely, it asks us to participate in the transformation of the subject through metaphor and imagery. Think of the way D. H. Lawrence describes, in one of his poems, ‘the drooping Victorian shoulders” of a kangaroo; or how Nabokov describes a piece of tissue paper falling to the ground with “infinite listlessness,” or how Aleksandar Hemon describes horseshit as looking like “dark, deflated, tennis balls,” or how Elizabeth Bishop describes a taxi meter staring at her “like a moral owl,” or how the novelist and poet Adam Foulds notices a blackbird “flinching” its way up a tree.

These are superb examples. I agree with Wood’s main point – metaphor is an aspect of close noticing. But is it “transformation of the subject”? I don’t think so. Metaphor is descriptive. It calls up a picture. It helps us see the subject more clearly. It makes the subject more vivid. But it doesn’t transform it.

The third element of Wood’s theory – the most profound, in my opinion – is rescue. He says,

What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death – from two deaths, one small and one large: from the “death” that literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. I mean, by the latter, the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention.

He refers to the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard:

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary – the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”) – is steadily retreating: in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back in the most ordinary things – to soccer boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax.

That, to me, is the golden key – art’s germinating principle. Wood beautifully sums it up in his penultimate paragraph: “To notice is to rescue, to redeem; to save life from itself.”  

The Ugly Americans

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

America, America, shame on you! 

Yesterday, I watched the video replay of the meeting between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky in the Oval Office. Trump and Vance yell at the Ukrainian President, calling him “disrespectful” of the U.S., berating him for not signing a peace deal on whatever terms they dictated. It was a disgraceful, nauseating, ugly spectacle. But it did make one thing crystal clear: Trump has sided with Putin. Evil has triumphed. One dictator has embraced another. America has turned ugly.

I want no part of American culture right now. That’s my gut reaction. I hold Americans responsible for what happened yesterday – all Americans, including Democrats. Trump is a product of your sick bipolar politics. Whether you like it or not, he represents all of you. The New Yorker is about as anti-Trump as you can get. I realize that. Nevertheless, I’m tired of reading about him in your pages. I’m sick of the cartoon covers, too. Trump loves attention, good or bad. The New Yorker lavishes it on him.

Once again, I, a Canadian, find myself questioning why I should continue a blog that celebrates an American magazine, American literature, American art. A couple of weeks ago I went through this same soul-searching when Trump threatened Canada with punishing tariffs and suggested we’d be better off joining the U.S. as the 51st state. He even referred to our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, as Governor Trudeau. But I got over it. Did I want to terminate a fifteen-year-old blog, which I love writing, just because of Trump’s bullshit? I decided no, and resumed blogging. But now, after seeing the way Trump and Vance bullied Zelensky in the Oval Office yesterday, I don’t want to have anything to do with America. America has turned ugly, ugly, ugly. I don’t recognize it anymore. 

So I’m back in the same quandary I was in a few weeks ago. I want to go on, but I don’t want to go on. I’m going to take a few days to think about it. In the meantime, The New Yorker & Me is suspended.  

3 Extraordinary Explorations of Place: Ian Frazier's "On the Rez"

This is the third in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite literary explorations of place – John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens (1967), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands (1998), and Ian Frazier’s On the Rez (2000) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review On the Rez.

This great book is a portrait of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation located in southwestern South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. The area is part of the Great Plains. The book can be considered sort of a sequel to Frazier’s wonderful Great Plains (1989), which I reviewed in my series “3 for the Road” a few years ago (see here). Both books share a love of the prairie and the Indian way of life. Frazier’s longtime friend Le War Lance figures centrally in both.

But there are differences, too. On the Rez is edgier. The first chapter sets the tone:

Walking on Pine Ridge, I feel as if I am in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we’re gone. There are wind-blown figures crossing the road in the distance who might be drunk, and a scattering of window-glass fragments in the weeds that might be from a car accident, and a baby naked except for a disposable diaper playing in a bare-dirt yard, and an acrid smell of burning trash – all the elements that usually evoke the description “bleak.” But there is greatness here, too, and an ancient glory endures in the dust and the weeds. The way I look at it, this is the American bedrock upon which the society outside its borders is only a later addition. It’s the surviving piece of country where “the program” has not yet completely taken hold.

On the Rez is also darker than Great Plains. How dark? Check out this passage from near the end of the book, after it deals with the tragic death of Frazier’s Pine Ridge hero – nineteen-year-old star basketball player SuAnne Big Crow:

So much is so wrong on Pine Ridge. There’s suffering and poverty and violence and alcoholism, and the aura of unstoppability that repeated misfortunes acquire. But beneath all that is something bigger and darker and harder to look at straight on. The only word for it, I’m afraid, is evil. News stories emphasizing the reservation’s “bleakness” are actually using this circumlocution for that plain, terrible word. For journalistic reasons the news cannot say, “There is evil here.” And beyond a doubt there is. A bloody history, bad luck, and deliberate malice have helped it along. Sometimes a sense of it comes over me so strongly that I want to run home to bed – for example, when I walk down the row of almost-new child-size bicycles in a local pawnshop, or when I see a bunch of people the police have recently evicted from White Clay staggering back to it, or when I’m driving on a deserted reservation road at night and there’s a large object suddenly up ahead, and I skid to a stop a few feet in front of it, and it’s the hulk of a car so completely incinerated that it has melted the asphalt around it; it’s just sitting there with no warning, with no other cars on the scene, empty and destroyed and silent in the middle of nowhere. At such moments a sense of compound evil – that of the human heart, in league with the original darkness of this wild continent – curls around me like shoots of a fast-growing vine.

But good exists on Pine Ridge, too. Everywhere he goes, Frazier looks for it. He finds it in the life of SuAnne Big Crow. What a story that is! Frazier stumbles on it quite accidentally. One day, he and Le War Lance are driving on Highway 18 in Pine Ridge, and Frazier notices a single-story factory-style building across a weedy field. A sign by the highway says it is the Su Anne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center, and below that are the words “Happytown, USA.” Frazier asks Le if he knows who SuAnne Big Crow is. He says, “She was a basketball star for Pine Ridge High School who helped ’em win the state championship and died in a car wreck a few years back. It was when I was living in New York, though, so that’s about all I know.” A day or two later, Frazier visits the building, and the rest is literary history. He discovers one of his greatest subjects:

At the end of the hallway on the right was a smaller room with glass trophy cases along the walls. The trophies all were from the athletic career of SuAnne Big Crow, the teenage girl in the photos, the person for whom the center was named. I looked at the trophies, I watched a short video of playing on a VCR in the room, I read some framed news stories about SuAnne Big Crow, and a sense of discovery came over me. Here was a hero – not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero, or an American hero, but a combination of all these. I had thought that Oglala heroes existed mostly in the past. But a true Oglala hero appeared in the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was looking the other way, in suffering Pine Ridge, right under everyone’s noses: SuAnne Big Crow. 

Frazier digs into her history. He talks with her mother Chick Big Crow. He talks with her high school basketball coach Charles Zimiga. He talks with members of the basketball team that SuAnne played for – the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes. He describes the Lakota shawl dance that SuAnne spontaneously did at center court in a pre-game warm-up in the town of Lead. She was fourteen at the time. Lead fans were yelling at the Lady Thorpes, calling them “squaws” and “gut-eaters.” SuAnne ran out onto the court, “unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance.” She also began to sing in Lakota, “swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl.” The crowd went completely quiet. Frazier writes,

In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.” 

Most memorably, Frazier reconstructs the 1989 state Class A championship game in Sioux Falls between the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes and the Milbank Lady Bulldogs, in which SuAnne scored the winning basket in the last second of play. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a scramble, Milbank has it for an instant, loses it; and then, out of the chaos on the floor: order, in the form of SuAnne. She has the ball. She jumps, perfectly gathered, the ball in her hands overhead. Her face lifts toward the basket, her arched upper lip points at the basket above the turned-down O of her mouth, her dark eyes are ardent and wide open and completely seeing. The ball leaves her hand, her hand flops over at the wrist with fingers spread, the ball flies. She watches it go. It hits inside the hoop, at the back. It goes through the net. In the same instant, the final buzzer sounds.

Frazier also recounts how SuAnne died. She and Chick were driving to Huron, South Dakota. At Kadoka, SuAnne took the wheel so that her mother could have a nap. About six miles past the exit for the town of Murdo, on a long, gradual upgrade, SuAnne apparently fell asleep. The car went off the road to the right and hit a delineator post. The car rolled twice. The driver’s-side door came open as the car rolled, and SuAnne was flung from it.  

In an unforgettable scene, Frazier visits the site on Interstate 90 where SuAnne and Chick’s car accident occurred. He finds the fatality marker erected by the state:

After a few minutes I walked back down the incline to the fatality marker and sat beside it in the grass out of sight of traffic. When I did, I noticed wildflowers – little megaphone-shaped blossoms of pale lavender on a ground vine, called creeping jenny hereabouts, and a three-petaled flower called spiderwort, with a long stem and long, narrow leaves. The spiderwort flowers were a deep royal blue. I had read that in former times the Sioux crushed spiderwort petals to make blue jelly-like paint used to color moccasins. Mid-June must be these flowers’ peak season: among the roadside grasses, lost hubcaps, and scattered gravel, the spiderwort and creeping jenny grew abundantly.

It's a beautiful, lyrical passage – a wonderful tribute to SuAnne. At this point, Frazier seems in a state of heightened consciousness. In his head, he composes the text for a SuAnne Big Crow historic marker. He notices a grove of cottonwoods and walks to it:

Perhaps because of the rolling topography, I could hardly hear the traffic here. Just a couple of hundred yards away, the twenty-four-hour-a-day noise of the interstate had disappeared into its own dimension. The cottonwoods stood in a grove of eight or ten, all of them healthy and tall, around a small pool of clear water bordered with cattail reeds and dark-gray mud. Herons, ducks, raccoons, and dear had left their tracks in the mud not long before. From the cattails came the chirring song of red-winged blackbirds, a team whose colors no other team will ever improve on. Old crumpled orange-brown leaves covered the ground around the trees, and false morel mushrooms of a nearly identical shade grew in the crotches of the roots. The cottonwoods had appeared a deep green from the highway, but seen from underneath, their leaves were silvery against the blue sky. High above the trees bright white cumulus clouds piled one atop another. They went on and on, altitude upon altitude, getting smaller as they went, like knots on a rope ladder rising out of sight.

It's an extraordinary passage – beautiful, exact, epiphanic. It brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.

Over a four-year period, 1995-99, Frazier visits the rez many times. He roams its landscape, logging his impressions as he goes. His eye is for the overlooked and disregarded – that’s one of the things I love about his writing. “A man collecting empty cans in a big plastic sack walked across a vacant lot with the cans crinkling in the sack and the grasshoppers rising around his legs in such numbers that they collided with each other in the air.” “A pale bunch of teenagers sits on the curb outside Big Bat’s licking ice cream cones, making a row of white knees.” “Black cows topped with snow stood breathing steam in the whitened fields while hawks sat in cottonwoods above, their feathers so fluffed out against the cold they looked like footballs.”   

 

Meaning is where you find it. Frazier finds it in the most unlikely places – Big Bat’s Texaco, the Red Shirt Table Road, PTI Propane, the Red Cloud School, Bill’s Bar, the Arrowhead Inn, the Oglala Tribal Council room, the Cohen Home, and, as we’ve seen, the SuAnne Big Crow Health and Recreation Center. He finds it in the star quilt that Florence Cross Dog makes for him (“The quilt was like a map of the reservation, with the gravel roads and dirt lanes and one-water-tower towns and little houses in the middle of nowhere stitched together and made shiningly whole”). He finds it in the litter on the ground (“At the picnic area by the powwow grounds, a litter of bitterroot rinds covered the usual flooring of Budweiser shards”). He finds it in people: Le War Lance, Floyd John, Florence Cross Dog, Aurelia Two Crow, Chick Big Crow, Charles Zimiga, Doni De Cory, to name but a few. Most of all, Frazier finds inspiration in the life of SuAnne Big Crow: “SuAnne Big Crow, though gone forever, is unmistakably still around. The good of her life sustains this place with a power as intangible as gravity, and as real.” 

On the Rez is one of the most profound, moving explorations of place I’ve ever read. My review doesn’t come close to doing it justice. Maybe in future posts I can do better. My next post in this series will be on structure.