OUT AND ABOUT : All in the Telling

Hearing authors read, one often hears how best to read them.

Ian Frazier’s reading at Dutton’s on Nov. 29 was revelatory. A soft-spoken man with dark blue eyes and a pigtail, Frazier reads from his new book, “Family” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, reviewed in Book Review Nov. 27). He reads the section about the Indiana and Ohio frontier, an account of people moving west into a land of nonstop trees, which they called “wastes” and promptly leveled.

Settlers became skilled at wielding axes, and they revered ax-makers, Frazier reads. They drank whiskey, loved discharging firearms, attended revival meetings where they fainted and writhed with the spirit, while preachers spoke to them in the holy whine, the holy laugh and the holy bark.

After Frazier finishes reading, an audience member suggests that, although it is clear that Frazier has done a tremendous amount of research, the way the facts roll out in his writing, one after another, it seems more as if Frazier learned everything in the third grade and just has an amazing, enviable recall.

Frazier admits what pulls him (and, eventually, will pull the reader) through these impressive torrents of detail: “Sometimes I write the whole thing just to get to one fact.” In the passage about shooting, for example, settlers sometimes competed in target practice for the target itself: a turkey, say, which would be secured so only its head showed; whoever made a clean head shot won the bird (“Bill shots didn’t count”). “I just loved that fact so much,” Frazier says, laughing. “Of course it counted for the turkey! . . . In nonfiction, whole books can be built on one fact that’s so great, that you love so much. . . . It’s important to know which fact it is, especially in the editing process, because you’ll destroy the whole piece if you lose the one fact in it you love.”

On Dec. 1, at an event sponsored by UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum, in a room hung with Daumier prints from the 1830s, poet Richard Howard reads to a standing-room-only audience. Impeccably bedecked in canary-yellow shirt and smart, owlish DNKY eye-wear, Howard speaks his work like the most civilized and urbane of raconteurs. He talks about Mozart and Henry James and the landscape artist Antonio Canaletto; of an exhibition of New Yorker covers in Tokyo, and manatees at New Smyrna Beach, Fla. While Howard’s formal abilities are considerable, it becomes clear in the hearing that formal concerns are purely in service of the telling. There is often no sense of being read to: This is fluent conversation, vivacious, good-natured, studded with wordplay (“-no other verb can state / so well the means of its ap- / parition: a manatee must emanate”) and moving aphorism, such as this passage from his eulogy for Matthew Ward (1951-1990) in “Like Most Revelations” (Pantheon):

Our gifts belong to the world,

whether avowed or privately bestowed;

but our failings--all that we cannot give away--

belong to those who love us, those we love.