Family (First Edition)

The grand sweep of American history is writ small in this family history/memoir by humorist Frazier (Great Plains, 1989, etc.). Frazier undertook this effort after his parents died in the late 1980s, to ``find a meaning that would defeat death.'' But his project seems more complicated and self-conscious, if not pretentious: an attempt to somehow reclaim American history for himself, a white Protestant. His preoccupation with his own religious doubt, contrasted with the firm faith of his ancestors- -whether German Reformed, Old School Presbyterian, or, like his great-great-grandfather Simeon Frazier, a member of the antiauthoritarian Disciples of Christ--culminates in a strange, reductionist review of American history as an expression of the decline of Protestant faith. More broadly, Frazier shares indiscriminately with us every detail he has been able to root out: from the momentous (the arrival of Thomas Benedict on these shores in 1638 and his descendant Platt Benedict's founding of Norwalk, Ohio) to the trivial (his great-great-uncle Charles's first attempt at fly-fishing and his grandmother's showing family pictures to Tennessee Williams in Key West). The quantity of information that could have rendered full-blooded portraits of long-ago generations is lacking; the lengthy catalogs often offered (trite entries from a great-grandfather's school diary, quotations from his parents' rather ordinary love letters) seem like fillers. The histories of the Fraziers, Wickhams, Benedicts, and Hurshes do follow the outlines of American history: the push west (all his relatives ended up in Ohio); the Civil War (Norwalk was a stop on the underground railroad); industrialization (his father became a chemist for Sohio). But Frazier's prose is flat as a prairie and his humor dry as stone. Only at the end, in interviews with two colorful relatives, and with the description of the deaths of his teenage brother Fritz from leukemia and of his parents, does the tale reach emotional heights. An object lesson in the pitfalls of writing a family history for anyone other than your family. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Frazier, author of the best-selling Great Plains (Farrar, 1989), illuminates the recent history of this country by crisscrossing the nation to track down the names and stories of relatives as far back as his great-grandparents. Though at first the past seems as orderly as the listing of such simple details as births, marriages, and occupations, we soon move past now-peaceful graveyards to the roiled accounts of what real life was like for the people who joined the westward migration, fought in the Civil War, prospered in the oil boom, and suffered the untoward effects of progress. By weaving in his own circumstances as a young lad growing up heir to hardworking, pious traditions, Frazier converts what could have been merely a hearty retelling of popular history into a searching tale of parallels that solder together 130 years like links in the chain of life. This entrancing saga will resonate powerfully for readers reaching their middle years as the 20th century ends. Larger libraries may want multiple copies.
Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the author of the widely applauded Great Plains (1987), about a 24,000-mile van trip across the Midwest, comes another good book--but inconsistently so. Frazier writes about his family's past, and although some parts are fascinating, others are rather tedious. Readers will envy Frazier's extensive knowledge of his family history and his access to so much extant documentary evidence. He's done his research well, and he brings into his account of his family's ups and downs a substantial amount of background information on social, economic, and domestic history from colonial times to the present. We meet his progenitors on a personal level, hearing about how they grew up, courted, made a living, and died and about their individual achievements and disappointments. At times the narrative sweeps along with the drive and fluidity of fiction, but at other times, it descends into a mere recitation of facts that only family members would care about. Still, this is an effective illustration of the richness of history on the level of ordinary people who are neither kings nor presidents, and given the popularity of the author's previous book and his high profile as a regular contributor to the New Yorker, expect demand. Brad Hooper