10 Best "Personal History" Pieces: #9 Ian Frazier's "Snook"

Illustration by Ralph Steadman, from Ian Frazier's "Snook"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Ian Frazier’s “Snook” (October 30, 2006).

This delightful piece is about Frazier’s experience fishing snook. What’s a snook? Frazier tells us:

The snook is an elegantly constructed fish. It’s narrow, but not too – not snaky like a pike or a barracuda – nor does it grow to be chunky like its distant relative the bass. The snook’s shape is close to the platonic ideal for a fish, in my opinion. The slight concavity of its upper jaw gives it a racy, rakish profile. A narrow, ruler-straight line the color of tattoo ink runs along its side, which is an understated silvery-white.

The piece is composed of four untitled sections. Section one tells about one of Frazier’s earliest sightings of a snook. He was hitchhiking from Key West to New York City. He got a ride from a young guy from Kentucky who was in the Keys to look at a sailboat he wanted to buy. Frazier accompanied him on his search for the boat. They eventually found it. Frazier describes the scene:

A bright sun shone from almost straight overhead. The sailboat floated in the clear water; extending below it to the sandy bottom was its precise, hull-shaped shadow. I looked more closely. In the middle of the shadow, between the boat and the bottom, finning almost imperceptibly, was a snook. My idling, time-killing mood stopped as if I’d just tromped on the brakes. A snook! Twenty-five feet away! With a snookish sense of aesthetics, the fish made a symmetrical third among the images of sailboat and shadow. He had even positioned himself facing the same direction as the boat’s bow. The way he was holding there, you could have easily missed him, so boldly did he mimic boat and shadow, hiding motionless in plain sight.

Frazier describes watching as this particular snook is caught:

With a jerk the hook was set, and there followed the wildest close-quarter angling battle I’d ever seen. The snook dove this way and that around the boat’s keel, veered for the pilings, jumped, thwapped his tail against the boat, splashed, cartwheeled, all as if right before us in a bathtub. The angler had foreseen the street fight. His line was extra-stout, his hook strong. Soon he had the fish up on the dock and was pushing a stringer through his gills. Before he carted him off for supper, he let me marvel at the trophy lying there gasping on the planking. The older guy I am now wishes the snook had been left alone in his ingenious lie. But the young guy I was then had really wanted to see what would happen, and stare close-up, and touch the wonder with his hand. 

Frazier describes this early snook encounter beautifully. He conveys the excitement he experienced when he saw the snook. “My idling, time-killing mood stopped as if I’d just tromped on the brakes. A snook! Twenty-five feet away!” I remember reading this passage when the piece first came out nineteen years ago. It’s stuck with me ever since, almost as if I’d spotted the snook in that boat shadow myself. 

In section two of the piece, Frazier tells about a fishing trip he took with his friend Don to the Pigeon River, in northern Michigan. They’re fishing for trout, and having zero luck. Frazier writes, “We returned to camp in the dark – wet, fishless, and bummed.” I love that sentence. The next day, they decide to find a tackle shop and find out what they should be doing to catch trout on the Pigeon. They find one in Gaylord called the Alphorn Shop. Standing behind the counter is a man named Fred Snook. He takes them out on local waters – the Sturgeon, as well as the Pigeon – and shows them how he fishes in heavy brush. Frazier says of him,

Fred could put a dry fly in a saucer-size hole among a confusion of branches and twigs where even visualizing the cast seemed to call for trigonometry and string theory. When the only open airspace around him was directly overhead, Fred could make his back cast go straight up. You wondered how Fred himself ventured through some of the places he fished, like you wonder when a buck with big antlers comes out of a dense thicket. He had an otherworldly facility for not getting person or gear tangled, and he always found a quick out when, rarely, he did.

In section three, Frazier and his family are vacationing in the small Florida town of Everglades City. Frazier sets out to hire a fishing guide and catch some snook. But the guide turns out to be a tarpon angler. Everywhere they go, they find tarpon. Frazier catches two of them. He writes,

Tarpon have big scales and a lower jaw that’s overshot, like a bulldog’s. In that flat coastal landscape – tidal river, mangrove islands, horizon – the giant I hooked was a sudden stroke of verticality, leaping and splashing and spinning like a waterspout touched down. Tarpon are noble and bilingual fish that make long migratory journeys between the American coast and Mexico and back again. I liked watching them cruise by two or three abreast in the shallow bays and then continue into the far distance, the long front spines of their dorsal fins tracking above the surface like whip antennas. 

In the fourth and concluding section of “Snook,” Frazier is back in Everglades City. This time he seeks a guide with credentials specifically for snook. He finds one in the person of Don McKinney. McKinney turns out to be one of Frazier’s great “characters,” right up there with Le War Lance (in On the Rez) and Sergei Lunev and Volodya Chumak (in Travels in Siberia). McKinney takes Frazier up tidal rivers through mangrove swamp. Frazier writes,

Once we had enough draft, he let down the engine and we roared across one reach and then another, heading inland, until we turned into the mouth of a tidal river and swooped up it like “Apocalypse Now.” As the river narrowed we slowed, the boat rocking on its own wake, and then coasted into a quiet intersection where this river met a smaller one. We eased next to the mangroves on our left, and Don McKinney shoved the pole among them into the muck and tied us to it. Mangroves enclosed us, their thicket of flying-buttress roots chuckling softly in the falling tide. He took out a cigar and lit it using a Zippo lighter emblazoned with a leaping fish in gold – a present from a high-ranking executive at Zippo for whom he sometimes guides. With that he seemed to complete himself, finally. Don McKinney has pale-blue eyes and a long, shrewd face that a cigar seamlessly becomes part of. 

Frazier continues,

He began telling me just where in this particular intersection a snook might lie. Beneath that crotch of old tree trunk, veined like bridge cable; next to that stump; or right over there, against that far bank, where the water looks deep and likely. When the perturbation of our arrival quieted down, the surface became glass-still again. The spot he indicated, pointing to it now with the tip of his bait-casting rod, reflected the mangroves above it, their shiny green oval leaves with here and there a yellow one, and a few white, dead branches corkscrewing out, and on the branches several air plants, a lovely parasite that grows on dead wood and resembles the top of a pineapple. Don McKinney cast his topwater plug into the heart of the likely spot, inches from the bank. He let the plug sit a moment, then gave it a twitch. At that, a snook struck with a violent swirl that twisted the surface reflection around itself like a bedsheet. 

That last sentence is inspired!

Frazier ends his piece brilliantly. McKinney takes him to a place on the Lopez River where it widens into a bay. “The yellow-green, slightly murky water in the cove lay flat calm.” Frazier scopes out the water before he casts. He notices a floating door in the middle of the cove: “The late afternoon sun hit the cove at an angle and caused the prism of the door’s shadow to descend into the water on a slant.” Frazier writes,

Of course I remembered the snook in the shadow of the sailboat thirty-odd years before. I cast my lure to the door three times, five times, twelve times. I put it just shy of the door, near the top, near the bottom, and beyond the door. I landed the plug with a rap right on the door itself, and then, carefully so as not to get hooked, pulled the plug off and swam it away. I really peppered that door. Nothing doing ... Oh, well.

I made a less careful cast past the door and to the left of it. I turned to say something to Don McKinney. Maybe pausing for that extra moment or two I let the plug sink longer than I’d been doing before. Still looking at him, I began to retrieve, and felt a jolt. He was looking at my plug. On his face I saw the joyful ignition of angling triumph. I turned back. A large and handsome snook with my plug in its mouth leaped head over tail in the air.

In summarizing this great piece, I’ve left out many wonderful details, e.g., Don McKinney getting stuck lures out of the mangroves (“His first address to the problem involved a no-hands repositioning of his cigar, shifting it by lip motion from one side of his mouth to the other and re-clenching hard with his teeth”), the sight of three manatees (“They swam by in a second about two feet down, as graceful as fat people who can really dance”), Don McKinney on his bicycle, “holding an unwieldy bouquet of fishing rods in one hand.” 

“Snook” is a tour de force of evocative description. You don't have to be a fishing enthusiast to appreciate it. You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its writing. 

Inspired Sentence #2

My own re-photography project was a matter of simply being open to what a place could communicate to a person – standing in what was often a place that felt very far away, looking around to experience the panorama through my own experience, as if I were in that box of wood on a tripod, as if I were, to use the nineteenth-century photography term, a sensitive plate.

I love this sentence. It’s from Robert Sullivan’s wonderful Double Exposure (2024), in which he explores the work of the great nineteenth-century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan. Sullivan so closely identifies with his subject that his writing enacts O’Sullivan’s art. Here’s another sample, this from the book’s brilliant Chapter 8 (“Salt Lake Desert, 1869”):

As the light shifted, I felt as if I was on the wet plate of a photographer, my own self, and by experiencing the light and the mist and the lake itself, I was being exposed, as if what was precious and destructive in me, my silver and guncotton, was being touched and changed, as if the world was moving into me while something inside me escaped. 

Sullivan imagines himself as O’Sullivan’s wet-plate camera. It’s an inspired perspective, providing remarkable insight into both O’Sullivan’s art and Sullivan’s deeply personal experience of it.  

January 13, 2025 Issue

I think the best line in this week’s New Yorker is found in Justin Chang’s “Mean Time,” a review of Mike Leigh’s new movie Hard Truths. Describing Pansy Deacon, the profoundly unhappy character at the heart of the film, Chang writes, 

Woe betide anyone who bumps into Pansy on the street, but to watch her onscreen produces a kind of bruised exhilaration; her viciousness has an awesome life force. At a certain point, I began wondering whether Pansy would be best served not by counselling or antidepressants but by a few pints and an open mike.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy. Chang says she gives “the performance of the year.” I think I’ll check it out.

Acts of Seeing: Grado

Grado, June 18, 2023 (Photo by John MacDougall)

I have a taste for boats and reflections. Both elements coalesce in this shot, taken one sunny morning in Grado, Italy. Lorna and I were biking around town, seeing what there was to see. The fishing boat is a beauty – sleek contour, great white-green-and-blue paint job. But it’s the foreground, with its gorgeous liquid reflection, blending the colors of the boat and the apartment buildings behind, that makes this picture one of my favorites.  

Postscript: David Lodge 1935 - 2025

David Lodge (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo)

I see in the Times that David Lodge has died. He’s probably best known as a novelist. But he was also an excellent literary critic. Three of his reviews that I remember with pleasure are “Simon Gray’s Diaries” (The Guardian, November 22, 2008; included in his 2014 Lives in Writing), “The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Kingsley Amis” (The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007; also included in Lives in Writing), and “Sick with Desire: Philip Roth’s Libertine Professor” (The New York Review of Books, July 5, 2001; included in his 2002 collection Consciousness and the Novel). 

In another piece, “History Boy” (The New York Review of Books, May 11, 2006; also included in Lives in Writing), a review of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories, Lodge made a comment that went straight into my personal anthology of great literary quotations:

Again and again in this book he [Alan Bennett] demonstrates that almost anything that happens to a person can be interesting, moving and entertaining if you write about it well enough.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #6 Joanna Biggs' "Sylvia"

Sylvia Plath, letter to Aurelia Plath, November 22, 1962

This is the fifth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Joanna Biggs’ brilliant “Sylvia.” It first appeared in the December 20, 2018, London Review of Books under the title “ ‘I’m an intelligence.’ ” A revised version called “Sylvia” is included in Biggs’ excellent 2023 A Life of One’s Own. That's the one I’ll consider here. 

“Sylvia” is a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vols. I & II (edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil). It’s one of the most passionate, intensely personal book reviews I’ve ever read. Biggs uses Plath’s life and work to understand her own life. And she uses her own life to understand Plath’s life and work. Her identification with Plath is near total. It began when she was seventeen:

At seventeen, she had told her journal: “I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ ” And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. I’m sure this is one of the things I found liberating about her when I was seventeen, that she wanted so much and so baldly, so unashamedly. I looked at my own depressed English coastal town, and I wanted more, and didn’t want to feel so guilty about it. Plath’s ambition, though it was stranger and wilder and more antique than mine, legitimized the things I wanted. I uselessly longed and hoped and wrote instead of dating, writing fiction and applying for summer schools. I didn’t think I was allowed to live the life of a writer, although that was what I wanted. Who did I think I was? I should aim for something I could get. But in reach were things I didn’t want. My longing was punctuated with bursts of desire that lasted long enough to complete the form for Oxford. In those moments, I had some Plath in me. I wasn’t waiting for permission that would never come.

Biggs also remembers feeling at seventeen that “I was liking something it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was for girls like me who were told that they thought too much, who scribbled their feelings in a spiral-bound notebook they hid in the drawer of their bedside table. As well as a reminder that being like that was dangerous.” 

Why dangerous? Because Plath’s life is psychologically fragile, and her attempts to deal with it “take her to one mental hospital after another, one psychiatrist after another, and finally to the electroshock chamber, where they grease her temples and let blue volts fly.” Biggs reports that on August 24, 1953, Plath attempted suicide “and was found barely alive, two days later.” 

Plath recovers. The following summer finds her on the beach at Cape Cod. This, for Biggs, is a key moment in Plath’s life. She calls it Plath’s Platinum Phoenix Summer: “blonde hair, red lipstick, and white bikini on creamy Massachusetts sand, alive when she could have been dead.” There’s a photo from that summer, showing Plath and her boyfriend Gordon Lameyer walking the beach. It figures centrally in Biggs’ piece:

In summer 2021, Plath’s daughter Frieda put a tranche of her mother’s possessions up for auction, including the tarot deck Ted gave Sylvia, their love letters, and their wedding rings. I was tempted by nothing – those are charged objects – apart from one thing: a snap from July 1954, right in the middle of the Platinum Summer. It is mostly of the sea and sky, but Sylvia is in the bottom left corner, smiling out of her blonde bob. She is walking toward Gordon in a halter-neck, high-waisted white bikini, and her left hand swings out loose. She really does look happy. I planned to frame it in white wood under conservation glass and hang it above my desk. Rise again, rise again, rise again. And I bid on it, and even seemed to be winning on my own birthday in July. I don’t know that I’m sad, really, to have lost it (it went for multiples of what I could afford) but I know that if I was ever guardian of a part of Plath’s life, it would be something from that summer, that Platinum Phoenix Summer. 

“Rise again” echoes through Biggs’ piece. She says it when she describes her return to Plath’s writing after her own marriage ends: “This time around, her efforts to rise again seemed clearer to me.” And she says it regarding Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, and Ariel, the collection of poems she completed before her death: they are “as much about rising again as they are about oblivion.” 

For me, the most absorbing part of Biggs’ intricate review is her analysis of the Plath-Hughes relationship. It begins, “When she meets Ted – which is not the same as saying it is his fault – her death comes into view.” She calls the marriage “fusional”: “Theirs was a fusional marriage: emotionally, physically, editorially.” She says, “They were mutually nurturing in their shoptalk, on which we can eavesdrop in the letters.” She says that Hughes’s affair shattered Plath’s idea of herself. But she also says this:

With the blow came exhilaration, and electroshock The Bell Jar-era imagery: “It broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel elated.”

Biggs mirrors off the Plath-Hughes break-up. She writes, “The idea of a shared life, a place I could live, where I would be believed in and valued, crumbled. After twelve years together, my marriage was over in less than a year of raising the questions. I was thirty-four, stunned and exultant.” She says, “During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both.”

Biggs quotes Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and says,

The Lazarene woman is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi slaughter, a sinner-survivor of Lucifer’s fire, but mostly I like to think of Sylvia steeling herself against coming face to face with her rival, her ex, and all the gossipers, with the drumbeat of these fuck-you lines in her head: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” 

Biggs’ piece ends unforgettably. She imagines that Plath still lives. She imagines meeting her:

I sometimes like to imagine that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about “a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect.” She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties, still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet. She is baffled by but interested in #MeToo. She still speaks Boston-nasally, but with rounded English vowels. She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror and she says: “What are you looking at?”

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole essay is inspired – one of the most creative critical pieces I’ve ever read.  

On the Horizon: T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style

I want to consider T. J. Clark’s style. It’s one of the most distinctive, delectable styles I’ve ever read. What makes it so? What are its constituent elements? How does it work? Why do I love it? Each month over the next twelve months, I’ll pick a favorite passage from Clark’s work and attempt to analyze it. A new series then – “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style” – starting January 22, 2025.