I've read a lot of Frazier, and have intermittently said "now I've read all of it," every time, I think, incorrectly. (He has a collection of essays about fishing that is likely to keep making that claim untrue unless my interests radically shift.) So I won't say that now. But he's a good writer in two modes: he writes short humorous essays in the old New Yorker style - his second (and maybe best) collection of that work, Coyote Vs. ACME, inspired a movie this year - and he also does reportage, usually vaguely in the profile mode, also informed by a long connection to New Yorker.
Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody takes its title from the third of the five pieces collected here. The five essays are all separate; what they have in common is that they were all written by Frazier, appeared in The New Yorker, and are about people. So I might as well take them individually.
"Authentic Accounts of Massacres" is possibly the slightest piece: Oberlin, Kansas is the home of the Last Indian Raid in Kansas Museum, commemorating a raid by Cheyennes in the fall of 1878. The museum had some events on that date of the raid over several years, and had a larger event for the centennial in 1978, which Frazier came to see. A group of Cheyennes were supposed to attend, lured by (among other things) the promise of free bowling. The Cheyennes did not, in the event, arrive: their bus broke down far away. So this is mostly about small-town Midwest people and their view of history, and some of the looking-at-landscape material that Frazier likes to do.
"An Angler at Heart" is a profile of Jim Deren, who ran a fly-fishing shop in New York City for many years. Frazier includes some of his own fishing stories here, but it's mostly about conversations with Deren and the atmosphere of his shop (small, crowded, full of random odd things, on an upper floor of a random NYC building - you probably know the drill, though I doubt anything like that has existed in Manhattan for three decades at least). I will say it's pleasant reading even for those, like me, who have never had an interest in torturing fish.
The title essay is a profile of "Heloise" - the second of that name, actually Ponce Kiah Marchelle Heloise Cruse Evans, who took over the popular newspaper column "Hints from Heloise" from her mother after the latter's death in 1977. It's one part potted history of the household-hints column and one part "let Ponce talk about various things," and has some subtext about the kinds of day-to-day minutia (usually female-coded) that affect people's lives, and what that means.
Then "Bear News" is inspired by the several years Frazier spent living in Montana; it's about how bears interact with people and, in particular, about the ones that rummage through trash and break into cabins and (once in a very long while) attack people. The title is a reference to the fact that if you read about a bear in the news, it's not going to be good for the bear: bears that interact with people tend to do that more and more, which leads to their being killed by people (sometimes after the reverse, sometimes to prevent the reverse).
Last is a profile of two Russian émigré artists, "Komar and Melamid." This is probably the most obviously New Yorker-style piece, covering people famous in the arts who are mostly talking about their work.
Frazier has a lot of fine sentences and thoughts in all of the essays, and keeps them mostly in that self-effacing, obscure-the-narrator New Yorker mode - he's occasionally a character (especially in "Bear News" and "An Angler at Heart,") but mostly just a viewpoint and voice. It adds up to nothing larger, but it isn't meant to. They're all time capsules now, but that's the way of reportage: it all turns into fishwrap on Day Two. For those who don't mind stories of the past, there's a lot to find interesting here.
No comments:
Post a Comment