One after another, and then in bunches, like helmet tops of surfacing mermen, they came up in the outwash along the smooth wet sand.
What a great sentence. The kind you read and think, “I wish I’d written that.” It’s taken from a piece by Ian Frazier in the April 14 issue of the New Yorker titled Blue Bloods, which reflects on the current status of horseshoe crabs. And with that reveal, you can better appreciate the metaphorical gem at the heart of the sentence, describing a multitude of horseshoe crab shells inversely dimpling the surface of dark water lapping up on a full moon-lit beach in breeding season.
Frazier is a long time New Yorker staff writer, but as I read this piece I realize that he’s capable of much more than I’ve appreciated in the few pieces of his I’ve sampled in the past. It’s a particular surprise, since Frazier is also a humorist, and I’ve found his pieces in the Shouts and Murmurs section of The New Yorker to be horribly formulaic and devoid of humor (example: his “Cursing Mommy” pieces – oh please).
In this non-fiction piece, though, he’s a totally different author. That’s good, because whenever a new issue of this venerable, self-referential (and -reverential) magazine arrives, I look for articles of interest first, and second for my favorite staff authors. Some (like John McPhee) I’ll read regardless of the topic at hand, while others, like the just-deceased Jonathan Schell, I’m biased towards reading based on the author’s reputation for treating serious topics seriously, but not unduly impressed with as stylists. Too often, an issue arrives where neither the author nor the fluffy article selection tempts me to read anything at all. With this article, I’m shifting Frazier into the first list, and looking forward to his next time at bat to see whether he stays there.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Frazier has caught my eye, as he’s a writer in the mode of another New Yorker staff author, John McPhee: someone whose topics may not in fact be very topical or of great import, but whose writing is so well-crafted that it makes whatever he has chosen to write about worth reading. That’s certainly the case with this article, despite the fact that I learned nothing that I didn’t already know. But like McPhee, he populates his essays with interesting people introduced, and perfectly brought to life, in the merest handful of words.
Frazier shares the wealth of his style more liberally than McPhee, however. While the older author often throw off many pages of competent prose before bestowing a perfect metaphor or wry aside on the reader, in this piece every few paragraphs you encounter something that makes you smile, or stop to appreciate how economically, but effectively, Frazier has painted a scene or captured a revelation. Here’s another example:
I remembered a famous horseshoe crab fossil I’d seen pictures of. The horseshoe crab is in a matrix of rock that includes the fossilized imprint of the animal’s final tracks. In some distress, it left a wobbly, winding set of tracks and, at the end of them, died. Its fossil lies at the conclusion of its preserved last pages. Perhaps it found itself in anoxic water and couldn’t get out. But there is sense in what happened to it, a one-thing-after-another set of consequences, as there was, in fact, to everything around it and to all existence after and before. When no human consciousness existed, everything that did exist, including this dying horshoe crab, had its own story and made its own sense.
That’s gorgeously indulgent prose for The New Yorker, which for some time has defaulted in its non-fiction to a totally neutral, Spartan prose style, making for a dry read and leading the reader to an almost embarrassing sense of gratitude when someone (like McPhee) deigns to slip the reader a nugget when the editor isn’t looking.
As I’m between books, I plan to give one of his better-known books, Great Plains, a read. I’ll report back when I’ve finished it. In the meantime, if you have a similar love/hate relationship with The New Yorker, you might find that an earlier essay of mine on that topic may strike a chord.
I just read the horseshoe crab article; you write very perceptively about it. I first became familiar with Ian Frazier when another writer commented that Frazier had written a profile of Heloise Cruse (of “Hints from Heloise” fame) that most writers would have given their eye-teeth to write. So I tracked it down and It is indeed very good. Then I became familiar with Frazier’s writings about the Great Plains. He is excellent on this topic and makes me feel homesick for a place I’ve only driven through. I hope you enjoy the book.
I wish one could edit one’s comments to eliminate typos and other infelicities!
Thanks for your comments, and for visiting my blog. I am looking forward to reading Great Plains, and have enjoyed many books in the past that have dealt in whole or in part with the same area (William Least Heat Moon’s Prairie Erth (sic) focusing on Kansas; John McPhee’s series of books following Route 80 across the country; Aldo Leopold’s wonderful Sand County Almanac, describing the kettle hole prairie and wetlands of Wisconsin, and much more). On a cross-country drive two years ago (my third), I crossed Nebraska for the second time (this time through the center of the state rather than along the Platte river valley) and was totally charmed by the landscape.
I wish the editing tools were available in comments, too (but your comment looks fine to me).
Oh, I forgot—you mentioned that you don’t like Frazier’s pieces in the “Shouts and Murmurs” section. There was one last September (I think) called “Walking Correctly: The Facts” that I did think was quite funny. Do you remember that one?
To return to the Plains: Everyone thinks Kansas is boring as hell. But if you get off the interstate and drive back roads, Kansas is lovely—not just in the Flint Hills, but even in the flatter section in the western part of the state.
I enjoyed McPhee’s book “Basin and Range.” Is that one of the series of books you’re referring to?
I don’t recall that one in particular, and may well have liked some of Frazier’s Shouts and Murmurs but don’t recall them now. Perhaps the best one I recall was a Nora Ephron spoof of the Stieg Larson books that was exquisite. Most of their picks, though, really miss the mark (to my taste, anyway), including a couple by Woody Allen.
And yes, I do like Kansas a lot – in fact all of the Great Plains states. And also yes, Basin and Range is one; the others are In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California. He won a Pulitzer Prize for two of them, and then another for the collection of all of them, which he called Annals of the Former World.
Aside: one of my recent blog entries talked about Wikipedia rejiggering its search algorithm. I typed in “John McPhee” just now to remind myself of the other books – and my blog entry was the third entry. Now that is truly bizarre.