Gone to New York: Adventures in the City
Author: Ian Frazier
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux

For many, New York City is as much fiction as fact. Although over 10 million Americans live in one of the city’s five boroughs, more than 25 times that amount don’t. Yet almost every American shares stories about New York (many with only a mere thread of truth to them). My point: Everyone knows NYC and no one knows it.

Ian Frazier, writer, observer and—if the author photo on his new collection, Gone to New York: Adventures in the City, is an unairbrushed and a truthful depiction—the proud proprietor of the nattiest and most organically beautiful sideburns this great nation has ever seen, was once not a New Yorker. Originally an Ohioan, Frazier knows what it’s like outside of the city, which makes the love he has for it, and the stories he shares of his experiences in it, all the more realized.

The New York Frazier writes about is one of infinite experiences. It’s a place where the entire world has come together in the most interesting way. It is America, reduced to a spicy, sticky-sweet glaze.

Many of the pieces in this collection come in at under three pages, merely slivers from other slices of life. He writes about ineffective NYC cops, reviving a stranger via CPR and plastic grocery bags tangled in trees. Every story is a thing of beauty that excites as much as it inspires. His lens, which may zoom in on a dying woman’s lips one moment, can sometimes withdraw so far as to capture a picture so vast it’s beyond stark and once again intimate.

The centerpiece of this collection, “Canal Street,” coming in at just under 35 pages, is a sprawling, lyrical and downright brilliant essay that has us following Frazier as he walks from one end of Canal Street to the other. Along the way Frazier lends us his eyes, ears, nose and penchant for the insignificant. We meet Gary, a bigoted shopkeeper who thinks he understands New York’s gutters better than anyone. “See those bleck guys—they’re t’ieves. That white guy, with the earring, he’s a junkie. He beats his girlfriend with the sexy t-shirt.” From there it’s down to the Chinese vegetable stands selling lotus root and white carrots, then to a 1988 gang shooting and its subsequent shrine, then all the way down to where Canal is just another Lower East Side street, where the “gutter holds blue safety glass… birdseed, a squashed gherkin, puddles of fluorescent-green radiator coolant.” And just when you think you’ve reached the end of the essay (having reached the end of Canal Street), Frazier continues, heading underground and into the Holland Tunnel where, surprisingly, the essay seemed to be heading the entire time.

Riddled with tangents that can, like an umpire with a liberal strike zone, initially infuriate and bewilder, but ultimately amuse and excite, Frazier creates essays that simply are America. His sentences twist and turn like a tourist wandering the city, sometimes ending up somewhere terrifying, sometimes terrific, but always unexpected. Frazier dissolves the line between entertaining and educating like no other writer today.