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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Former "Talk of the Town" reporter Ian Frazier talks about hanging out with the Oglala Sioux.
Feb 1, 2000 | Everybody who has read Ian Frazier's short humor writings -- collected in "Dating Your Mom" (1986) and "Coyote v. Acme" (1996) -- knows he is a funny guy. But he's not funny when he talks about the New Yorker, where he spent 21 years as a staff writer before pulling out in disgust at what Tina Brown had done to the magazine. He still feels bitter towards S.I. Newhouse, the tycoon who bought the New Yorker in the mid-'80s, dumped its legendary editor, William Shawn, replaced him with Alfred A. Knopf editor in chief Robert Gottlieb and then, five years later, dumped Gottlieb for Brown.
But the reach of Shawn -- who died in 1992 -- is long, and Frazier's new book, "On the Rez" (out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), bears the stamp of the editor's influence in its meandering, essayistic, more or less unclassifiable eccentricity. ("Everything has to have some kind of purpose now," Frazier laments of the direction that magazine writing has taken. "And for a lot of great nonfiction, there's just no way to say why this is interesting, why you care about this subject.")
"On the Rez" is about American Indians -- specifically about the Oglala Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. The book is stuffed with fascinating material -- about the casinos that have recently made several tribes rich; about Red Cloud, the rival of Crazy Horse, whom Frazier wrote about in his first full-length nonfiction book, "Great Plains" (1989); about Indians and alcohol, a subject that, as he explains below, he had a hard time figuring out how to approach (there is a lot of drinking in his earlier books, but by the time he started "On the Rez" he'd quit); about a heroic Oglala basketball star named SuAnne Big Crow, who died in a car crash shortly before her 18th birthday; and especially about his bumpy friendship with a mercurial Oglala named Le War Lance. The writing is (predictably) wonderful, but it may strike anyone who's been bewitched by the daredevil virtuosity of Frazier's earlier work as surprisingly straightforward and even subdued. The often somber subject matter, he explained to me, called for a simpler, less antic style.
As a "Talk of the Town" reporter in the '70s, Frazier hung out with a talented group of young New Yorker writers that included Jamaica Kincaid, Mark Singer, George W.S. Trow and the late Veronica Geng (a close friend who died in 1997). In 1982 he left his lower Manhattan loft for an A-frame house outside Bigfork, Mont., and began the research for "Great Plains." He moved back to New York for the writing of "Family" (1994), and then, in 1995, he moved his family back to Montana -- this time to Missoula -- to research "On the Rez."
The drive from Missoula to Pine Ridge is 780 miles. As I was reading I lost track of how much ground Frazier covered in all his trips back and forth. (His books would be very different if he didn't have a driver's license.) This summer he and his family returned to the East Coast. I interviewed him at their house in New Jersey on a freezing night a couple of weeks ago.
Has Le War Lance seen the book?
I sent him a copy.
And have you spoken to him since then?
Oh yeah, we've talked several times. I think he read it, but I don't know -- he hasn't said anything. The Atlantic sent him 10 copies of the issue with the excerpt from the book, and I said, "Well, what did you think?" He said two of them were stolen and the other ones he sold.
It's a peculiarly structured book. Is the structure something you came to as you were writing it, or did you know before you sat down what shape it was going to have?
I knew where I wanted to start, and I knew where I wanted to end. I knew that the moment where SuAnne Big Crow is in the gym at Lead [S.D.] was emotionally powerful. And then, when she wins the championship -- I knew that was a very powerful moment; it caused a big celebration on Pine Ridge and brought together all of the different factions who had fought during the Wounded Knee days in the '70s. I knew that it made sense for the part about SuAnne to be toward the end. But other than that I didn't have an awful lot of sense of structure.
All my nonfiction books kind of have an essay structure. You go from here to here to here more or less as your curiosity takes you, and you just have confidence that at each place you're going to be somewhere. But an essay is best if it's not outlineable.
This one, though, has the most cohesive subject.
Right. In "Family" I was running in every direction, trying to talk about all of these different things -- the history of America, the history of Protestantism, what happened in my family and what happened with my father's company. After "Family" I wanted to have something a little narrower. The tighter the focus, the easier it is to know what fits and what doesn't.
