March 21, 2011 Issue

Maybe I should just change the name of this blog to “Ian Frazier and Me,” and be done with it. Frazier’s my man! A new piece by him is a major event. He has two in this week’s issue: a Talk story called “Heavy Hitters,” and a feature titled “Back to the Harbor.” It’s interesting to see how Frazier handles the Talk tradition that discourages the use of the first person singular. “We” is the preferred point of view, as in “Lately, we’ve been pondering the pigeons in Bryant Park.” Frazier is the quintessential first-person-singular writer – it’s one of the many things I like about his writing. In conformity with the Talk “rule,” he generally refrains from using “I” in his Talk pieces. But he doesn’t often use “we” – and no wonder; it seems pretty damned artificial to ask a writer to write as if he’s a crowd. Sometimes he uses “you,” as in “If you drilled a hole straight through the earth, starting at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, you would pass through ten inches of pavement, four feet of pipes …” (“Antipodes,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1975; included in Frazier’s great 2005 collection Gone To New York). But most of the time, he writes in the third person, giving his Talk pieces an objective feel that’s quite distinct from his other work, which is written in a much more personal style. Now and then, I suspect Frazier of sneaking himself into his Talk stories by posing as an anonymous questioner. For example, in this week’s “Heavy Hitters,” which is a wonderful description of an evening of Daily News Golden Gloves amateur boxing at the Cultural Performing Arts Center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, there’s a referee named Ilya Friedman, who is “introduced to the crowd as having been a boxer in the Soviet Union.” We know Frazier is a passionate Russophile. In the story, Frazier has an unidentified man sitting next to Friedman asking him questions:

The man asked him where in Russia he was from. “Odessa,” he replied, pronouncing it “Ah-dessa.” The man asked what weight he had fought at over there. “When I started, I didn’t even have any weight, I was a child,” he said. “Later, I fought at seventy-five kilos, what is called cruiserweight in America. I fought a hundred and thirty-seven amateur fights in the Soviet Union, and won a hundred and twenty-four.” The man asked what was the difference between these matches tonight and boxing in the Soviet Union. “These are friendly fights,” Ilya Friedman said.

Maybe I’m crazy, but, as I say, I suspect that the man doing the questioning is none other than Frazier himself. This is not the first time I’ve had this feeling. At the end of Frazier’s memorable Talk piece “Lovefest” (The New Yorker, March 1, 2010), Frazier writes, “Somebody asked the Reverend Daughtry if today’s was the coldest march he had ever been on.” I have a hunch that “somebody” was Frazier. But I could be wrong.

The other piece by Frazier in this week’s issue – “Back to the Harbor” – is a beauty. Frazier has so many interests – seal-watching is one I didn’t know about until now. It’s about Frazier nosing around Staten Island and other places looking for seals. He eventually finds them when he takes a seal-watching cruise in New York Harbor. Frazier has a way of putting things in his stories that most other writers leave out. For example, in “Back to the Harbor,” he talks about having a flat tire as a result of hitting a pothole: “I thought I had no spare, but when I pulled over and checked, I did. I changed the tire in a lot in Perth Amboy and got to Staten Island just after sunrise.” I like incidental details like that – after all, they’re part of life, and deserve to be mentioned. In “Back to the Harbor,” Frazier’s descriptions of park benches (“All the park benches had blankets of snow pulled up over their knees”), birds (“A flock of brants on the water croaked their creaky calls, ring-billed gulls on the breeze teetered like skateboarders”), a ship (“The captain sped up to avoid a huge in-bound cargo ship, which sped by in our wake with its containers piled high like a waiter balancing dishes”), the basking posture of seals (“curved like cocktail wieners on toothpicks”), a peregrine falcon (“The elegant little predator came into focus against the sky framed by the bincoculars’ circle, moving his head back and forth surveillantly”) are inspired. He devotes a very funny paragraph to the description of a plastic patio chair that he finds on the beach at the foot of Joline Avenue. If you collect verbless sentence fragments, as I do, check out this dandy from “Back to the Harbor”: “A huge tractor tire on its side with herring gulls standing on it, a row of white pines a recent storm had knocked down, deep snowdrifts, a man in a car in the parking lot doing a crossword puzzle.” “Back to the Harbor” is like a prose poem of facts. I enjoyed it immensely.