Reviewed by Tommy Ebrahimi

Ian Frazier is obsessed with details and with the specific: the color of an old friend’s kitchen (daffodil yellow), the length of the world’s largest beaver dam (2,790 feet), the inscription on an armored car from the Russian Revolution (“Enemy of Capital”). This particularity suffuses everything Frazier writes. In The Snakes That Ate Florida—a compilation of selected articles for The New Yorker, from 1970 to present—the longtime writer and humorist astutely employs detail to bring forth meaning and empathy.

The collection is divided into sections of reporting, essays, and criticism. Svelte columns about afterparty rodeos at Madison Square Garden lead to impressions of Minnesota Fats, the “big-money barracuda” who inspired Jackie Gleason’s character in The Hustler. More research-intensive stories, like one about the cane toad invasion of suburban Florida and another about a maraschino cherry mogul, play next to Frazier’s more personal reflections on driving in pre-dawn New York or his “over-white winter” in the Rockies. The book reads like a quarterly magazine compiled by a singular, adroit hand. That’s no surprise, given Frazier’s career. In the acknowledgements, he calls magazine writing “a satisfying way to bring art into line with something resembling an acceptable life.” And while that life sent him to exciting places like Alberta, Siberia, and Florida, Frazier’s keen eye for details, and how he weaves them together in unexpected ways, is what makes the collection shine.

Frazier opens “Frogpocalypse Now,” the aforementioned essay about invasive cane toads, in space. From satellite orbit, he draws the reader down to Southwest Florida, then further still to a metro area like Naples or Miami Beach, to finally an illuminated street paved over reclaimed swamplands. “Go in as close as you can,” urges Frazier, “down to the round, black, gold-flecked eye of one of those shapes, in which the light above it is a pinpoint blue reflection. You are eye-to-eye with a cane toad.” From a panoramic view of America, Frazier transports the reader to the precise time-space the story inhabits. The cane toad is most active at twilight and thrives in human-centric spaces. Frazier places the reader on that Floridian sidewalk to underscore his point that this story couldn’t happen anywhere else. Frazier knows that a conceptual understanding of invasive species—how they outcompete local populations and upset ecosystems—won’t resonate as much as a face-to-face encounter with a cane toad, glowering under the nightglow of a streetlamp. This precision hooks the reader, sets the stage, and defines Frazier’s writing throughout this book.

Some writers might cherry-pick a few key facts and dress them up in language to effectively communicate their idea, employing details as a means to an end. For Frazier, the details themselves are the end. His essay “Pick Your Part,” for example, conveys life in Los Angeles—nomadic, eccentric, and frantic—through detail alone. The arc of the piece is straightforward—Frazier and his brother-in-law arrive at a car junkyard, pick over the scraps, and leave with a part, just not the one they were looking for—but it is anything but simple.

During his search, Frazier notes evocative ephemera found in abandoned vehicles, including “a water-damaged copy of Macroeconomics, by Robert J. Gordon (another Monte Carlo) … an invitation to a Thanksgiving Free Turkey Lunch at the Victory Outreach Church in El Sereno, California (Datsun 200 SX) …  Polaroid snapshots of the same woman in different hairstyles (Toyota Celica GT).” This cataloguing, an inventory of the cars and their contents, is a key part of the essay’s power. Via his attention to these forgotten artifacts and their doomed hosts, Frazier excavates the anonymous lives of everyday Angelenos: the self-taught economist, the overwhelmed community organizer, the lost lover. The single item and the car’s make and model are narratives told through detail, with space for imagination, wonder, and romance. Here, Frazier understands that in the specific is something universal, and carefully noted details play a major role in his attempts to understand and encapsulate.

This instinct suffuses the whole collection with Frazier’s unmistakable perspective. The Burmese python invasion in Florida’s Everglades isn’t rendered through statistics, but through conversations with “the man who caught the snake with his feet.” The Great Plains fires of 2017 are an overwhelming tragedy until Frazier filters the narrative through the eyes of Millie Fudge, the EMS director of Clark County who “walks leaning forward a bit, as if successfully towing a great weight.” These details don’t just leaven the writing, they define it.

This is not to say that every piece in the collection is perfectly measured. Occasionally the details feel overwrought. In “Invaders,” an essay about the Mongols and Baghdad, Frazier takes great care to situate readers in the history of the nomadic invaders and the Arabian Peninsula’s power dynamics. While useful in setting the scene, these details can obfuscate the essay’s main argument about the United States’s invasion of Iraq. Later, in “Reading Lolita,” surplus details about Frazier’s childhood act as a minor red herring; the lush elaboration about being a child distracts from the piece’s more difficult questions about growth, memory, and confronting legacy.

On balance, though, the abundance of detail is well-measured and instructive, which stands out in today’s hyper-generalized information ecosystem. Today, Frazier’s reverence for precision, intention, and specificity stands in stark contrast to large language models and their capacity to subsume and regurgitate. Artificial intelligence-driven writing can’t compete with Frazier’s keen, pointed language. For example, his work conjuring the Waldorf’s smoke-filled ballroom in 1976 and the domineering monologue of Paul “Bear” Bryant at a 1980 awards banquet embodies such fidelity that it feels more real than the results of most Google searches. Framed another way: Frazier’s writing is dedicated to imagining others complexly and rendering their worlds in resplendent detail.

Frazier’s long career is a testament to the resonance and power of observation, understanding, and precision. Through this dedication to the process and the writing that follows, he reminds us that literature’s capacity for empathy comes from specific knowledge of the world and its people. Nowhere is that clearer than in The Snakes That Ate Florida.

Tommy Ebrahimi is a San Diego-based writer enrolled in UC Riverside’s Palm Desert MFA Program, where he serves as an associate editor for The Coachella Review. His work has appeared in Open Ceilings, Matchbox Magazine, and elsewhere.