Essays paint a vivid picture of New York

Gone to New York

Adventures in the City

Ian Frazier

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 224 pp., $22

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“YOU an American, so you see straight. But the world is not straight, it’s crooked.” That’s how Gary -- Holocaust survivor, Army/Navy surplus merchant and Ian Frazier’s old landlord -- describes the mentality of the author, whom I consider America’s greatest essayist.

I don’t know Frazier, so I can’t say if this line from “Canal Street,” one of the essays in his latest collection, “Gone to New York,” is a fair description of him. But it’s an uncanny explanation of the central problem in Frazier’s writing. Not the problem with his writing, but in it: Frazier knows that he’s a congenital optimist, bred of a particular strain of American hopefulness mixed with basic Midwestern decency. It’s through such eyes that he looks at New York, a crooked city in a fallen world. He tries to make sense of the affection he feels for so troubled a place, and he reports back to us, in prose as fine as any being made today.

It’s this tragic sense that elevates these essays above Frazier’s other writing, like his humor pieces or his fly-fishing shorts. Consider this subway scene from his 1995 essay “Take the F,” a collage of meanderings about Brooklyn: “Once a man sang the words of the Lord’s Prayer to a mournful, syncopated tune, and he fitted the mood of the morning so exactly that when he asked for money at the end the riders reached for their wallets and purses as if he’d pulled a gun.” That juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly is classic Frazier and well-suited to describing New York, which derives its energy from that mix of high art and dirty streets, of vitality and mortality.

In one of three essays about removing plastic bags from trees (a task for which Frazier and some friends patented an elongated hook), he describes a cluster of party balloons stuck in a branch for weeks: “I watched it go from sort of festive to unrecognizable as it persisted like a debt.” It’s the metaphor as brutal non sequitur, a clean, cruel cut. Another describes the intersection of Canal Street and the Bowery: “As you approach, pigeons leap from the trash like flames.”

Frazier is of the tradition that favors the everyman and deems the swells beneath notice. But unlike Joseph Mitchell, Herbert Asbury and Luc Sante, whose love of the declasse is more exaggerated, leading them to freaks and crooks, bearded ladies and mobsters, Frazier finds uniqueness in truly plain people. He likes teenagers at play and men in old-fashioned jobs, like typewriter repair or cobbling.

He likes to walk in New York. “Sometimes I walk from my building downhill and north, along the Brooklyn waterfront, where cargo ships with scuffed sides and prognathous bows lean overhead,” he writes in “Take the F.” He finds boroughs eminently navigable, places that can be conjured as simple maps in the mind’s eye: “Queens is shaped sort of like a brain.” “Brooklyn, New York, has the undefined, hard-to-remember shape of a stain.”

Yes, Frazier can repeat himself, and reading any writer’s essays in a row can be diminishing. Queens is a brain, Brooklyn a stain. When Frazier first spots an ailanthus tree, he seems to have a wondrous knowledge of flora; the third time he sees one, he’s just a guy who really digs one kind of tree.

And although Frazier works brilliantly at 5,000 words, in briefer pieces he sometimes casts about for profundities that he never finds.

But Frazier’s ear is as sensitive as Joan Didion’s, his reporter’s eye as sharp as Janet Malcolm’s. If one did have a quarrel, it would be with his old-fashionedness. Many of his essays detour to his native town, Hudson, Ohio, from where he has “Gone to New York.”

Hudson is treated at length in Frazier’s “Family” (1994), my all-time favorite book. There Hudson emerges as a complex place, home to as much sadness as joy. But in these essays, the town can seem a too-simple metaphor for better times, a place where sweethearts hold hands and marriages hold together.

Maybe that’s what Hudson is, or was. But Frazier doesn’t hate New York. He sees it as bigger, harder, in some ways better, and definitely a terrific place to visit. As for living there, he’s willing to but he never seems to feel at home. It’s just that sense of estrangement, loving but slightly baffled, that lends his essays their special poignancy, a mix of the homely and the cosmopolitan that nobody since E.B. White has done so well.

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Mark Oppenheimer, editor of the New Haven Advocate, is the author of “Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.”