I see in The New York
Times that Carl Rotella, reviewing Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild, says that Frazier “tends to leave things a little
baggy.” I’m not sure what he means, but it doesn’t sound attractive. As a
description of clothes, “baggy” indicates loose and hanging in folds. As a
description of eyes, it denotes folds of puffy skin below them. As a
description of writing, it means … what? Loosely constructed? Voluminous?
Inflated with inessential elements? These aren’t valid descriptions of
Frazier’s work. Rotella also says,
Frazier doesn’t insist on a perfect roundedness of form in
his essays. Rather than arranging every last element for maximum thematic
coherence and effect, he’ll leave in a moment, a scene, seemingly for the hell
of it. Do we need to see Jansen trying to find his Volvo in an airport garage
by homing in on the sound of his wool-colored dog barking from inside it? Is
it absolutely necessary, in order to understand there are relatively few
outward signs of the opioid crisis, to wander around Staten Island and note an
ice cream truck playing “I Can’t Stop Loving You”?
Well, speaking for myself, I don’t need to see these things, but I enjoy
seeing them. Frazier’s inclusion of incidental experiences, stuff that most
writers omit, is one of his maker’s marks. For instance, in his great “Form and
Fungus” (in Hogs Wild), about the
invention of an all-natural substitute for Styrofoam, there’s a part in which
he’s on his way to visit the Ecovative company in Green Island, New York,
and he stops at an abandoned railroad bridge that crosses a branch of the
Mohawk River. This digression produces one of the piece’s most delightful
passages:
All river confluences are glorious. Canoes full of Iroquois
Indians travelled past here, and fur traders, and soldiers, and surveyors for
the Erie Canal. The canal turned left near this point, followed the Mohawk’s
shale valley westward, tapped into the Great Lakes, and made the fortune of New
York City. Here, as at all confluences, wildlife congregates. In the early
morning, it’s an amphitheatre of birdsong, while Canada geese add their usual
commotion. So many crows show up in the evenings that they plague the town of
Green Island, and the mayor has to scare them away with a blank pistol.
That last line about the crows and the mayor and the blank
pistol makes me smile every time I read it. There’s nothing baggy about it.
It’s a wonderful evocation of the river. Frazier makes its inclusion seem the
most natural thing in the world.
Here’s another example. In Frazier’s superb “The March of
the Strandbeests” (also in Hogs Wild),
an account of his visit to Scheveningen, in the Netherlands, to observe beach
trials of Theo Jansen’s walking Strandbeests, there’s a day of rain when
nothing is happening at the beach, so Frazier hops a train to Amsterdam and
visits the Rijksmuseum, where, in a small room, “not part of the Greatest
Hits,” he finds an “unassuming show of landscapes on paper.” Frazier writes,
People were passing through it without stopping. I ducked in
and took a breath. The show, “Dunes: Holland’s Wilderness,” was about the shore
where I’d just been. The introductory label said, “Holland’s landscape is
man-made. Only the sands and the dunes along the coast are more or less
nature’s creation. They are our natural defense against the sea. . . . The
earliest known drawings of Holland’s landscape are views of the dunes near
Haarlem recorded by Hendrick Goltzius around 1600. Many landscape specialists
followed in his footsteps. . . . Their work shows the wide, endless space, the
quiet and the wildness.”
All the drawings were sketchbook size, done in pencil, ink,
or black chalk. If the giant Rembrandt in the adjoining room was jet-engine
powerful, his little horizontal sketch here, of a shore landscape, was moving
for its simplicity and self-effacement. Some of the dune sketches showed the
blades of windmills against the sky; the main purpose of Dutch windmills wasn’t
so much to mill anything as to pump the incoming sea back out. A Jacob van
Ruisdael sketch with a heavy shading of cloud in one corner showed more clearly
the same quality of torque that his paintings often have. In a vitrine, a
leather-bound sketchbook of Gerard ter Borch the younger lay open to a
black-chalk drawing of a tangled patch of brush on a hillside. Such a no-count,
lovely piece of ground! The drawing dated from 1634, though it could have been
done in the Scheveningen dunes, or maybe West Texas, just last week.
Such a no-count,
lovely piece of ground! I love that line. It’s an epiphany. It perfectly
expresses a key element of Frazier’s governing aesthetic – his eye for the overlooked
and the disregarded. We wouldn’t have the benefit of this sudden insight,
except that Frazier decided to take a side-trip to the Rijksmuseum and to write
up his experience and include it in his piece on the Strandbeests. Does
Frazier’s digression make his piece “baggy”? Not in the eyes of this beholder.
It makes it a great essay. Adam Phillips, in his Side Effects (2006), says, “The literary essay as a form – at least
from the early nineteenth century onwards – has not only allowed for the
artfulness, the interest of digression, but has also positively encouraged it.”
I rest may case.
Postscript: There’s one sense, of course, in which Frazier is a baggy writer. He’s obsessed with
bags in trees. See his classic “Bags in Trees” trilogy (in his 2005 collection Gone to New York) and his recent "The Bag Bill" (The New Yorker, May 2,
2016). But clearly this isn’t what Rotella is referring to.
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