Retrospective Review: Ian Frazier's "Route 3"

In this second post in my series “Retrospective Reviews: New Yorker Pieces Remembered With Pleasure,” I want to explore Ian Frazier’s brilliant “Route 3” (The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004; included in his great 2005 collection Gone to New York). I’ll use the same “Retrospective” format I used previously, structuring my review around the following four questions:

1. What is “Route 3”?

2. How is it constructed?

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

4. Why do I like it so much?

1. What is “Route 3”?

Ian Frazier’s “Route 3” is an account of a five-hour walk that he took one fall afternoon, in 2003, along a busy twelve-mile stretch of New Jersey highway (Route 3) between Montclair and Weehawken. It’s approximately 5,200 words long, divided into five sections. Here’s a brief summary of each section:

Section 1 – Describes Route 3 (“traffic-packed, unalluring, grimly life-like”; “road’s shoulders glitter with a boa of trash”); emphasizes its ordinariness (“Along much of the road on either side, the landscape is as ordinary as ordinary America can be: conventioneers’ hotels and discount stores and fast-food restaurants and office complexes and Home Depot and Best Buy and Ethan Allen, most of the buildings long and low, distributed in the spread-out style of American highway architecture”); tells about traveling the route by bus (“Brake lights on vehicles ahead reflect on the bus ceiling and tint people’s faces”) and his enjoyment of the ride (“If this were a ride in an amusement park, I would pay to go on it”); mentions various places along the route (Royal Motel, Tick Tock Diner, Hoffman-La Roche Pharmaceuticals, Holy Face Monastery), and tells brief, interesting stories about each of them [e.g., “When Sean J. Richard, a labor racketeer associated with New Jersey’s DeCavalcante family, heard a while back that he was to meet with a capo (allegedly) from New York’s Lucchese family named Dominic Truscello in a van outside the Tick Tock Diner, Mr. Richard became so frightened that he soon decided to turn state’s evidence”].

Section 2 – Describes suburban New Jersey (“a bunch of different stuff mixed up like a garage sale”); again emphasizes the landscape’s ordinariness (“From a car on a highway, though, suburban New Jersey looks so nondescript and ordinary as to be invisible”); refers to the New Jersey landscape paintings of George Innes, which “show the land before it was developed and paved”; mentions a bus driver named Sal (“Sal is the only bus driver I know of who seems to notice what’s along the road”).

Section 3 – Describes New Jersey traffic (“After the relatively easygoing traffic of Montana, New Jersey driving had a predatory fierceness I wasn’t ready for”).

Section 4 – Tells about Frazier’s walk from Montclair to Weehawken along Route 3 (“I put on broken-in shoes and brought a map, in case I had to detour. At about noon of a mild day in late fall, I set out”); describes the earth beside the highway (“Neither cultivated nor natural, it’s beside-the-point, completely unnoticed, and slightly blurred from being passed so often and so fast. And yet plants still grow in it, luxuriantly—ailanthus, and sumac, and milkweed, and lots of others that know how to accommodate themselves to us”); describes the trash (“I saw broken CDs, hubcaps, coils of wire, patient-consent forms for various acupuncture procedures, pieces of aluminum siding, fragments of chrome, shards of safety glass, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, condom wrappers, knocked-over road signs, burned-out highway flares, a highlighter pen, a surgical glove, nameless pieces of discarded rusty machinery, a yellow rain slicker with “Macy’s Studio” on the back . . . Scattered through the grass and weeds for miles were large, bright-colored plastic sequins”); describes crossing the Hackensack River via the westbound bridge (“Walking on the curb ledge required a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other gait as the trucks and cars went by at sixty-five m.p.h. an arm’s length away. I held the gritty railing with my right hand. Below, the brown Hackensack swirled around the wooden pilings of a former bridge. In these narrow confines, the traffic noise was a top-volume roar. After a long several minutes, I made it to the other side”); describes taking the ferry to the pier at Thirty-eighth Street; tells about his bus trip back to Montclair (“The back seat, and the whole bus, with its closed-in, comfortably crowded atmosphere of people going home, seemed without any connection at all to the highway howling inaudibly just outside”). 

Section 5 – Describes his search for the site in Weehawken where Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton fought their famous duel (“Now the place is a construction side lot for the Lincoln Tunnel. There’s an office trailer, a heap of pipe lengths, a portable john, some road-building stone, a chain-link fence, weeds, little orange plastic flags warning of buried cable. The long-ago life-and-death dramas I’d been picturing could not fit here; enterprise and time had painted out the past”). 

The above outline doesn’t come close to doing justice to “Route 3” ’s enjoyable narrative. And it omits my favourite moment when Frazier dons the Macy’s Studio slicker he finds on the side of the road. (I’ll talk about this inspired incident in more detail below.) What it does convey, I hope, is “Route 3” ’s marvellous attentiveness to places and things that are often overlooked and disregarded.

2. How is it constructed?

“Route 3” unfolds in steps, each step advancing the piece’s main theme: the revelation of the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. The first three sections describe the highway’s apparent ordinariness. Frazier observes that even its traffic seems ordinary (“To further add to Route 3’s averageness, the traffic on it is not much different from traffic anywhere else”). But then, in section 4, when Frazier actually enters Route 3’s reality and walks along its shoulder, that traffic, along with everything else about the road, becomes amazingly and exhilaratingly specific. We even hear “the dull rubber thumps of tires hitting pavement seams.” The piece ends in epiphany. In Weehawken, Frazier searches for the famous duelling grounds and learns they no longer exist. He writes,

Now the place is a construction side lot for the Lincoln Tunnel. There’s an office trailer, a heap of pipe lengths, a portable john, some road-building stone, a chain-link fence, weeds, little orange plastic flags warning of buried cable. The long-ago life-and-death dramas I’d been picturing could not fit here; enterprise and time had painted out the past.

And then comes his epiphany:

Then I looked across the river. You would have sat in the boat with your second, your pistols in their case on his lap, while someone rowed. For the twenty minutes or half an hour the journey took, you would have wondered, or tried not to wonder, about the condition in which you might come back. The far shore would grow closer, New York would diminish behind. The great city, the river in between, and this shore of scary possibility haven’t changed. For questions of honor that we would find trivial or hard to understand, the touchy white men who founded our country sometimes shot each other to death within a thousand feet or so of where the Lincoln Tunnel toll booths are now.

“Route 3” ’s structure, condensed to its bones, looks like this: ordinary > extraordinary > epiphany. 

3. What is its governing aesthetic?

In “Route 3,” Frazier says of Sal, he’s “the only bus driver I know of who seems to notice what’s along the road.” Noticing what’s along the road is what “Route 3” is about. It’s a superb act of attention. When the piece appeared in The New Yorker, its tagline was “What I saw on the road through New Jersey.” Frazier specializes in noticing stuff that’s often overlooked. In “Route 3,” he shows that even a seemingly banal stretch of New Jersey highway rewards close observation. His ability to make art from what is most ordinary, commonplace, and disregarded reminds me of the work of Edward Hopper. Peter Schjeldahl said of Hopper, “He gets at slight but profound epiphanies of ordinary life.” That’s what Frazier gets at in “Route 3,” too. That’s its governing aesthetic.

4. Why do I like it so much?

I remember when I first read “Route 3” being so delighted by the part where Frazier puts on the yellow Macy’s Studio raincoat he finds on the side of the road that I laughed out loud. He does it, he says, to increase his visibility as he walks across the westbound bridge. It’s an inspired moment: Frazier so identifies with this no-account landscape that he wears a piece of it on his back.