Author of the equally weird and wonderful book about the American heartland, “Great Plains,” Frazier began his latest work after the death of his parents, when he began sifting through their effects. He found Christmas cards, photo albums, yellowing magazine articles, recipes and letters, letters, letters, some of them going back to the Civil War. He soon discovered that he didn’t know a lot about his parents or their parents, much less anyone further back in time. “Family” is the story of how he educated himself. A lot of people do this, of course, burrowing back into the past, feeling rooted and connected to the cosmos. Then they uncover a slaveholder five generations back and get the willies and walk off the job. Not Frazier. He found slave traders in his family, and kept on digging.
“In the end, I did not throw many papers away. I collected all the letters to or from my father and put them with a bunch of his other things in a box I labeled THE DAD MUSEUM. I did the same for my mother in a box labeled THE MOM MUSEUM.” He read their letters and the letters of their fore-bears. He read books his ancestors would have read, tromped over the battlefields where they fought, sat in the pews of their churches, all because “I wanted my parents’ lives to have meant something.” He examined everything he could think of, from “the smell of an old hymnal” to “the tone of a thank-you note… I hoped maybe I could find a meaning that would defeat death.”
Reading about the Fraziers and the families from whom they were descended, the Hurshes and the Wickhams and the Bachmans and the Wildmans, a reader’s eyes can glaze over mighty quick. Particularly at the beginning of the book, when Frazier’s run-through of family names sounds all too much like the Biblical “begats,” one is tempted to say, well, this may be interesting to you, Ian Frazier, but it’s your family, not mine. But as the story develops, it gets more interesting, especially when Frazier meanders off the track. His meditation on Stonewall Jackson’s dying words (“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees”) is worth the price of the book. And his thumbnail descriptions of his living kin are sharp and funny without turning mean: describing an uncle, he writes, “His smile, bald dome, and glasses are like lines in one of those brushstroke caricatures you see hanging on the walls of cocktail lounges.”
And then, somewhere in the latter half of the book, an amazing thing happens. As Frazier describes the typical middle-class doings of his family–packing the ear for vacation and driving straight through from Ohio to the relatives in Arizona; kids sneaking out at night to roam the streets of their suburban town; canning-the utter ordinariness of everything makes you forget the Frazier family and start thinking about your own. Yes, my grandmother did that… yes, Mother said that, too. The pages of the book have become like a mirror, with you staring at you. Clearly Frazier intends for this to happen. Near the end, he comes forth to lay his message on the line: “A meaning I discovered among the relies in my parents’ apartment is that meaning exists, but you have to look for it,” he writes, insisting 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 or dead and yet to be born.”
Such sermonizing would sound grandiose and embarrassing coming from anyone else, but all the labor Frazier has put into his own history has earned him the right to preach a little. He has acquainted himself with his past and found his footing in history. He is also a generous man, willing and able to turn the account of his personal quest into a story we all can use. Sometimes boring, frequently bumpy, but just as often beautiful and funny and smart without a shred of hipness, “Family” is a keep-er–an oddball classic that somehow manages to lodge itself squarely in the American grain.
