Word: fraziers
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...Great Plains (1989), though, Frazier wrote his insights down and produced an elegaic history of the vast, flat American heartland. He turns more serious still in Family (Farrar Straus & Giroux; 386 pages; $23), in which the subject is nothing less than a search for the meaning of life, for "a meaning that would defeat death." And he is not kidding...
...Eventually he put nearly everything into two boxes -- the dad museum and the mom museum -- and hauled them back to his Brooklyn apartment. These papers led him to take trips across the country to look at old houses and churches and to interview relatives. The process took years -- Frazier does not say it obsessed him, but his descriptions of his pursuit have that feel about them -- and Family is the result...
...rule, people have a minimal interest in family trees from which they themselves do not sprout. So Frazier may encounter some initial reader resistance, particularly since he was able to track his ancestors back to the 1600s on his father's side and the 1700s on his mother's. There are an awful lot of names to keep up with in the early stages of his story, and their relationships to the author ("Comfort Hoyt, my five-greats-grandfather on my father's side") can dizzy the genealogically challenged...
...patience will be rewarded. Frazier picks up momentum when he hits the 19th century. By that time his forebears were living in Ohio. Several of them joined the 55th Ohio Volunteer Infantry to fight Confederates in the Civil War. They saw action in two notable Union defeats, the battles of Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville, and survived. Some of the best passages in Family occur when Frazier follows, in a rented car, the marches undertaken by the 55th and tries to take himself back in time. Usually he succeeds, and when he fails he still shows his familiar flair...
...Most of my ancestors were Protestants," Frazier writes. "Compared to them, I suppose I am an infidel." In telling their story, he realizes, he is tracing a particularly American trajectory. The people before him were secure in their faith and in their right to shape and lead a new nation. Then a lot of things happened -- all meticulously noted in this narrative -- beginning with pioneer hardships, moving through wars and economic booms and busts, and winding up in the pleasant suburban comforts of Frazier's own Ohio childhood. "I think my parents' generation had little conscious idea what it believed...