Gone to New York: Adventures in the City

A mostly delightful collection of pieces Frazier, a contributor at various times for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, among other publications, wrote between the 1970s and early 2000s. Some are very short and those were, by virtue of their brevity, the least engaging. But his longer pieces - about Canal Street, a typewriter repairman, and his walk along Route 3 in New Jersey (a road I travel frequently) - are wonderful. He captures, even in the shorter pieces, the dingy, gritty, universal charm of the city I love, as well as its humanity.

The foreword by Jamaica Kincaid is great, as well.

4.25 stars

This is a collection of essays that Frazier wrote over the period 1975 to 2005, a number of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. As the title suggests, they’re mostly about New York City.

As with most collections, I liked some of the essays better than others and I struggled a bit with my rating. They started off captivating me, especially the one about Canal Street (“The traffic on Canal Street never stops. It is a high-energy current jumping constantly between the poles of Brooklyn and New Jersey”). In the 1970s, Frazier lived in a loft above an Army Navy store on Canal and he describes the whole length of the street ending with a history of the Holland Tunnel.

There are three essays on his efforts over the years to remove show more plastic bags from trees. He creates a Bag Snagger and has it patented and spends his free time plucking bags out of trees (“The snagger worked great--a twist of the crooked metal fingers would inveigle the bag, then the sharpened hook would cut it free. . . . The sensation was like having your arm suddenly extended sixteen feet, and the satisfaction like getting something out of your eye”). Eventually, he also creates a device to retrieve the helium balloons that people let go in the main concourse of Grand Central Station where they mar the beauty of the constellations on the ceiling.

I could go on about my favorites (the stories about the manual typewriter repairman, Frazier’s 12 mile walk along Route 3 in New Jersey to the Lincoln Tunnel, the quiet oasis of Butler Library at Columbia University, Frazier’s childhood growing up in Hudson, Ohio) but I’ll stop. As I mentioned, I struggled with my rating because there were occasional essays that didn’t engage me and I put the book down for a month but the last 100 pages were so good that I’m going to give the book 4 ½ stars.

Highly recommended for anyone with some knowledge or affection for New York City. show less

Essays chronicling a not-very-deep young man's time in New York and its suburbs. Well written, but awesomely shallow.

good book about growing up and moving to new york. doesn't everyone at least think of this?