Lallygagging Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody

By Paul Gray

Ian Frazier, 36, is an employee of The New Yorker, where during the past eleven years he has written occasional humor (Dating Your Mom, a collection, appeared last year) and factual stories, including the five pieces gathered together in Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody. On the surface, it would appear that Frazier does not exactly knock himself out with work. In fact, he confirms this impression, openly admitting to lallygagging on the job. In the first sentence of "An Angler at Heart," he confesses that he has often "taken a walk from the offices of The New Yorker along Forty-third Street -- across Fifth Avenue, across Madison Avenue, across Vanderbilt Avenue -- then through Grand Central Terminal, across Lexington Avenue, up to Forty- fourth Street, into the elevator at 141 East Forty-fourth Street, up to the third floor, and through the belled door of a small fishing-tackle shop called the Angler's Roost, whose sole proprietor is a man named Jim Deren."

Having found a bucolic niche in the heart of midtown Manhattan, Frazier eases himself into a story that is partly a profile of Deren, a guru to flycasters the world over and the "greatest man I know of who will talk to just anybody off the street." The author also digresses into a three-page list of the inventory in Deren's store and reminisces about his own fishing experiences and misadventures: "The woman told me to hold still and the dog wouldn't bite me. I held still, and the dog bit me in the right shoulder. I told the woman that the dog was biting me."

Frazier approaches his subjects like a man who does not want to move too fast and frighten them away. In the title story, he decides to find out a little something about Ponce Cruse Evans, the woman who writes the syndicated column "Hints from Heloise." This involves, for some reason, driving from Chicago to San Antonio, where Evans lives. "In Muskogee, Oklahoma," Frazier confides, "I saw a Taco Hut, a Taco Bell, and a Taco Tico." Then he has to find a suitable motel ("I wanted a locally owned one") and assess his impressions so far: "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."

The astonishing thing is that Frazier does come up with a detailed profile of Evans and her mother, who founded the column and whose name really was Heloise. This in spite of much duly reported bar- and restaurant-hopping and a brush with the law after finding himself lost in a deserted shopping mall: "He told me to give him my license and sit down and shut up or he'd throw my ass in jail for public intoxication. I told him I hadn't seen much else but public intoxication in San Antonio that night, and his handcuffs made a cricketlike sound as he took them off his belt. I gave him my license."

This episode ends happily, and so do all of Frazier's stories. The reader winds up laughing and knowing a great deal about subjects -- bears in northwestern Montana, a pair of madcap Soviet emigre artists -- that most people can live without. The author's loopy laziness is a pose; he works carefully and hard to make everything look like fun.