Gone to New York: Adventures in the City (review)

Personally, I owe a lot to Ian Frazier. I had just returned from a two-year Mormon mission to Uruguay. I had a bachelor’s degree in physics, but no interest in continuing. I was working through a temp agency, wondering what to do with my life. I thought I might like to continue my studies, but in what? In the fall of 1996, my mother bought me the Best American Essays anthology from Costco. I found many of the essays in it dull, and I almost gave up. But then I read “Take the F” by Ian Frazier. That was what I wanted to do with my life.

Formally, “Take the F” is a lot of lists describing Brooklyn, where Frazier lived at the time, and the F train, which he rode often into and out of Manhattan. It is a crafted observation of the minutiae, the overlooked details, the things most of us take for granted. It is meaning derived from selection and attention. More: it is techniques that seem resolutely anti-literary yet resound with the lyricism of real speech. And it is, in the end, a story of trial and recovery and unadulterated joy.

From that first encounter, I sought out Frazier’s other writings: three books of humor, a fascinating, far-reaching Family history, and a nonfictional ramble through what must be one of the most uninteresting patches of land anywhere in the world, the Great Plains. (Frazier managed to make the landscape sing with its history and its people’s stories.) I found past issues of the New Yorker and read Frazier’s essay about “Canal Street” and removing “Bags in Trees.” In the next year’s Best American Essays I read an essay very similar in shape to “Take the F,” but this time about “Someplace in Queens.” In coming years, Frazier published On the Rez, a companion to Great Plains, but this time focused more intently on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation of the Oglala Sioux; and The Fish’s Eye, a collection of his “essays on angling and the outdoors.” All this time, I kept hoping for a collection of his New York essays, a hardcover home for those pieces that had influenced me initially so irreparably.

That book was finally published in late 2005. Gone to New York collects 22 essays of varying length, mostly published originally in the New Yorker between 1975 and 2005. The whole is more than a paean to the city; it is something like a revelation of some of its quirks and quandaries. The best essays in Gone to New York are the long essays, which tend to repeat Frazier’s successful formula of lists and insights, but which are never redundant or tiring. In them, readers accompany a flaneur of formidable observational skill as he unravels significant stories in an artful, yet artificeless prose that seems like companionable conversation.

You can learn a lot from this book, too. Frazier investigates, for instance, the antipode of Manhattan, someplace in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and concludes that “there is no point in the United States where, if you drilled straight through the earth, you would come out in China.” He reveals that the 12’ 6” high Holland Tunnel is really a foot taller (with room to spare in case a truck needs jacking up). He interviews people, stand-ins for most readers, I would suspect, about the origin of the Holland Tunnel’s name, and finds only a Japanese tourist who knows that it was named after Clifford Holland, “the engineer who designed the tunnel and worked himself to death building it.” He talks with George Willig, who in 1977 climbed the South Tower of the World Trade Center Spiderman-style with clamping devices in the window-washing channels. He expounds the history of the typewriter, including the frustrating and mysterious universal adoption of the QWERTY keyboard design. As he walks Route 3 from his home in Montclair...