In the Frazier Museum

By Paul Gray

Ian Frazier's first book, Dating Your Mom (1986), collected a decade's worth of his hilarious short humor pieces, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker. Then came Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody (1987), which contained five pieces of New Yorker nonfiction. These displayed Frazier's tenacious reporting skills and whimsical self-consciousness: "I had not been in Texas long before I started having millions of insights about the difference between Texas and the rest of America. I was going to write these insights down, but then I thought -- Nahhh."

In Great Plains (1989), though, Frazier wrote his insights down and produced an elegaic history of the vast, flat American heartland. He turns more serious still in Family (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 386 pages; $23), in which the subject is nothing less than a search for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." And he is not kidding.

His quest, he writes, began after the death of his father in 1987 and his mother a year later. While going over his parents' effects and papers he discovered, among the many things they had saved, family letters dating as far back as 1855. Eventually he put nearly everything into two boxes -- the dad museum and the mom museum -- and hauled them back to his Brooklyn apartment. These papers led him to take trips across the country to look at old houses and churches and to interview relatives. The process took years -- Frazier does not say it obsessed him, but his descriptions of his pursuit have that feel about them -- and Family is the result.

As a rule, people have a minimal interest in family trees from which they themselves do not sprout. So Frazier may encounter some initial reader resistance, particularly since he was able to track his ancestors back to the 1600s on his father's side and the 1700s on his mother's. There are an awful lot of names to keep up with in the early stages of his story, and their relationships to the author ("Comfort Hoyt, my five-greats-grandfather on my father's side") can dizzy the genealogically challenged.

But patience will be rewarded. Frazier picks up momentum when he hits the 19th century. By that time his forebears were living in Ohio. Several of them joined the 55th Ohio Volunteer Infantry to fight Confederates in the Civil War. They saw action in two notable Union defeats, the battles of Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville, and survived. Some of the best passages in Family occur when Frazier follows, in a rented car, the marches undertaken by the 55th and tries to take himself back in time. Usually he succeeds, and when he fails he still shows his familiar flair for comic relief: "I figured that my suitcase, briefcase and golf clubs probably weighed about the same as the full kit and rifle carried by a private in the 55th. I considered parking the car and trying some of this march myself, fully loaded, just to get an idea what it was like. Then I decided not to."

"Most of my ancestors were Protestants," Frazier writes. "Compared to them, I suppose I am an infidel." In telling their story, he realizes, he is tracing a particularly American trajectory. The people before him were secure in their faith and in their right to shape and lead a new nation. Then a lot of things happened -- all meticulously noted in this narrative -- beginning with pioneer hardships, moving through wars and economic booms and busts, and winding up in the pleasant suburban comforts of Frazier's own Ohio childhood. "I think my parents' generation had little conscious idea what it believed," Frazier writes, and as a result the next cohort, his, "sort of pitched and yawed all over the place, spiritually."

Out of context, this remark sounds critical of his parents, but that is not what Frazier means at all. It is rare in contemporary writing to come across the pure love he expresses for the people who raised him: his chemist father, who worked 37 dutiful years for the same Ohio oil company; his schoolteacher mother, who dreamed when young of becoming an actress and who still appeared in amateur theatricals when Frazier was a boy. He once saw her do Lady Macbeth: "I remember especially her lines about snatching the smiling infant from her breast and bashing its brains out." The only thing his parents did wrong, Frazier suggests, was to fail to prepare him for the loss of them.

Frazier's long immersion in his family's past convinces him that "every person should spend a certain amount of time thinking about what he or she believes. Because what you really believe in coincides with meaning in a larger sense, with meaning that connects to other people alive and dead and yet to be born." At the end Frazier remembers sitting in his mother's bedroom overnight as her death approached. Suddenly he switches to future tense, foreseeing not only what will happen to her but also to him and to his children and to all the generations to come: "Our graves would go untended, and the graves of those who had tended ours would go untended ..." And what will remain? "The love bravely expressed, and the moment when you danced and your heart danced with you." Frazier's vision is an epiphany as moving as it is bleak and hard won.