I first knew of Ian Frazier as the author of some very funny short magazine pieces such as Lamentations of the Father, in which a harried father hands down rules for his children in the diction of Jehovah (“Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room”) and Coyote vs. Acme, which takes the form of a legal brief prepared by a lawyer on behalf of Wile E. Coyote detailing in precise, dry legal language his client’s very specific complaints with the various products (such as rocket-powered roller skates) purchased from the Acme Corporation. There is a touch of genius in these pieces, in the way they work a simple conceit so flawlessly and so well. They’re like great jazz solos—they sustain an astonishing level of creativity for longer than you would think possible. If you haven’t read them, go find them.
Then one day about 10 years ago I picked up and started reading a book by Frazier entitled Family. I was surprised to discover that it was very earnest and serious. I would not go so far as to say it contained no wit or humor, but there wasn’t a single sentence in the book that was there just to be funny.
Family is a kind of extended personal history. Frazier’s parents both died relatively young, in their 60s, and within a short time of each other. It fell to Frazier to go through their apartment and sort through their effects. He dilated over this responsibility until it into a kind of hobby, and his sorting and organizing evolved into actual research, wherein he traced his origins back in various directions and in various ways. He wrote about his aunts and uncles and his childhood, but he also wrote about the regiment his hometown raised during the Civil War, and what became of various members of that regiment. I loved Family. I loved it for the way it turned a gentle current of curiosity into a substantial, interesting, and even profound book. I loved it for the way Frazier incorporated himself into the book as a kind of humble, rather hapless presence. The book isn’t a memoir, it isn’t about him—and yet it is about him. It’s about any- and everything that led to his existence.
I think Family was a kind of memorial to Frazier’s parents, an act of reverence and devotion. But in a very indirect and understated way.
Frazier has written several more nonfiction books since Family; his latest is entitled Travels in Siberia, and I just read it. Frazier has no organic reason to write about Siberia—it’s not his heritage or his destiny. It’s just a whim disguised as a career move—or vice versa. When Frazier wrote Family, I don’t think he knew that he would be making a career of book-length travel fiction. Now, after several books, I guess he felt it would be prudent, from a professional perspective, to break some new ground.
Which is not to make Frazier sound cynical. I can well understand getting bit by the Russia bug—it’s happened to me. I took three years of Russian language in college after discovering Tolstoyevsky in my teens. It’s hard for Americans to imagine Russia and the Russians, even though they were our rivals and presumptive enemies for five decades. Russia isn’t a developed first-world middle-class nation, any more than it’s a successful former colony like Brazil, or a poorer third-world country. It’s a primary, powerful place, an unconquerable empire, but it’s also shabby and ill-run. Whatever else it is, it demands to be taken on its own terms.
In Travels in Siberia, Frazier has retained much of the deliberate amateurism of Family. He is still very organic—that is, spontaneous and rather arbitrary in the way he goes about things. Much of the book is taken up with an account of his 5000-mile expedition across the breadth of Russia, from St. Petersburg on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific, in the company of two rather unobliging, not terribly professional guides, in a rent-a-wreck van. This lends a rather slapdash “road trip” quality to the story. Frazier is forever being abandoned at mosquito-ridden campsites while his guides rendezvous with ladies. Or kicking around in the weeds by the side of the road as they try to improvise a repair on their vehicle. He lets Russia happen to him, and he takes Russia at face value—one person at a time.
After his cross-country trip, Frazier returns a year or so later to experience Siberia in winter. He re-hires his guide Sergei, and once again their relations fluctuate between amicability and hostility. Sergei resents Frazier’s interest in Siberian labor camps—much as an American guide might resent a Russian author’s interest in the camps where Americans interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Of course, the latter was a brief episode involving several thousand people., whereas the Russians exiled many millions to Siberia over the course of a century and a half. Most died. Some settled and became Siberians. A few returned to European Russia in their old age. Frazier tells us of the mining camps of the Russian far east, where convicts labored in the most horrendous conditions and were housed and fed like animals. Very few survived.
Frazier and Sergei silently suspend their feud one evening as they explore an abandoned convict camp deep in the forest on a snowy -40˚ night. The camp has changed little in the decades since it was abandoned, and the contrast between the still beauty of the night and the wretched bare dormitories where the convicts lived is eerie. Frazier and Sergei are no longer American and Russian, they are just two people who have found a haunted place.
