Gone to New York: Adventures in the City

GONE TO NEW YORK is Ian Frazier’s paean to that city. Published in 2006, it’s a series of twenty-three essays penned roughly between 1990 and 2004.I’ve been to New York City as a tourist only once. (Several visits to Long Island on business through JFK Airport don’t count.) I can understand Frazier’s attachment to the place. It doesn’t replace London in my affections, but still …The essays individually run the gamut from great to irrelevant to awful. The best are represented by “Canal Street”, a description of the author’s walk down such, “Take the F”, as in riding the F train of the subway, and “Someplace in Queens”, recording Frazier’s stroll through that borough. Reading these three essays is the next best thing to being there, I think.The reader will encounter the irrelevant with “Route 3”, in which the author relates his walk along that highway through New Jersey towards NYC, and “Out of Ohio”, in which he reminisces about growing up in that state. In a book about The Big Apple, why should one care except as to realize that Ohio isn’t the same in contrast?And the awful. GONE TO NEW YORK is dedicated to a friend of the author’s, Jamaica Kincaid, who reciprocates by contributing the Forward that monopolizes fully 5% of the text and who doesn’t know when to stop blathering on. In “Bumpin’n”, Ian simply transcribes the entries written in the visitors’ book at the Brooklyn Museum and, similarly, “In the Stacks” is mostly comprised of the graffiti written on the desks of the Columbia University’s Butler Library. The last two chapters mentioned simply illustrate the inanities spouted by the vulgar masses when given the opportunity – much like this review.GONE TO NEW YORK is probably worth reading for the gems of chapters glued, literally or figuratively, between the book’s covers, but it’s not one I would shed tears over losing if I’d mistakenly left it behind under a seat on the F train.

Those familiar with Ian Frazier's writings will also enjoy these essays. The concluding essay, "Out of Ohio," alone makes purchase of this volume worthwhile. Those not familiar with Frazier will find witty writing combined with insightful and detailed (at times) observation, along with a few of Frazier's private pursuits like plastic bags in trees.

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The New York in Woody Allen's movies is beautiful but unreal, like a movie star who's never as stunning in real life as on screen. Ian Frazier's New York, on the other hand, is violent and dirty, but real.These essays are arranged chronologically, from 1975 to 2005. (Oddly, there are no entries from the eighties.) Frazier writes about neighborhoods and bars and shops and characters. There are floods and robberies and murders.One of my favorite pieces is about a typewriter repair shop that Frazier finds when he needs his manual typewriter repaired. The owner, Mr. Tytell was one of the few typewriter repairmen left as word processors and then computers replaced typewriters. The article was written in 1997 and the 83 year-old owner had just renewed the lease on his shop for another ten years. Since ten years has passed, I was curious if the shop was still in business. A quick search revealed that the shop went out of business in 2001, but the family still has a successful document research service, doing forensic investigations of typewritten papers. No word on whether Frazier still uses a typewriter to write his essays.There are three pieces about Frazier's obsession with removing plastic bags from trees. This apparently is not a specifically New York obsession since he mentions trips to Los Angeles and Massachusetts and Illinois to remove bags from trees. When he first wrote about bags in trees, it didn't seem completely odd to me that he might remove bags in his own neighborhood. You want your neighborhood to look nice, don't you? But it became more of a sport for him and his buddies. They snagged bags instead of golfing. I suppose the fact that I read three pieces about bag snagging is testimony to Frazier's writing. I sure wouldn't have read three articles about golfing. And it's a lesson for the young writers out there -- if you can't find a quirky character to write about, become one.

Hunter Thompson may be gone, but personal journalism is alive and well as evidenced by this superlative collection of quirky,elegant pieces subtitled, "Adventures in the City". If Ian Frazier's book were a mystery, #1 would probably have posted a five-star review the day after it was published in November 2005. Since GONE TO NEW YORK is only a collection of casual essays, it has waited four months for its first customer review. Essays get no respect from Amazon customers -- or from Amazon either, for that matter. Amazon's entry for the book lists Jamaica Kincaid (who wrote the introduction) as the author, rather than Frazier.Frazier, a displaced Ohioan, makes the reader see New York through his eyes: focusing on peculiar and interesting details that go unnoticed by visitor and native alike. The longest is a 35 page profile of Canal Street (where he lived during its gritty years) and its denizens. In the aftermath of 9-11 he interviews George Willig, who earned brief celebrity-hood in 1977 by climbing one of the twin towers. Frazier reports on the vintage graffiti on desks in the stacks of Butler Library. He writes twice about "Bags in Trees". In the first he simply describes the diversity of plastic bags and other items that adorn trees in Brooklyn. A decade latter he tells how he and a friend became obsessed with removing the arboreal litter and end up inventing and patenting an extension tool for removing it. My favorite in the collection is "Typewriter Man" about Martin Tytell, who still sevices manual typewriters.

I loved New York but the same can be said for "Gone to New York". The facts and figures can't rescue a boring topic. After the first try I just didn't want to pick this up on my morning commute for the rest of the week but powered through. I'm giving Ian Frazier's essays just 1 star.