For years, Ian Frazier has been good-naturedly stuffing the New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs section with observations filtered through a range of hilariously moronic, incompetent and self-important fictional personas. Cranial Fracking contains 43 choice Frazier humor pieces from the past decade and longer, almost all of which were Shouts & Murmurs, and many of which flambé the newsworthy, or at least news-making, stories of their day.
Frazier seems to have a keen understanding of everything from globalism to arts funding to Prince's oeuvre to the toddler's brain ("CLAIM: Walking backward is better than walking forward"). But the discerning reader will pick up on a favored theme: the self-interest of the unreasonably rich ("Certain billionaires have evolved traits specially adapted to saving rain forests. Others have inherited characteristics well suited for preserving woodlands and open spaces near their multi-thousand-square-foot fourth homes").
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Frazier (The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days; Hogs Wild) has been in the game for a while, a couple of pieces in Cranial Fracking address the daunting prospect of growing old. In "Of Younger Days," Frazier's narrator rhapsodizes, "I had just turned sixty-three when I began the hesitant, sweet, shy courtship of my first real girlfriend. My wife was furious, of course." And only a philistine would not be moved by the collection's lone poem, "Lines on the Poet's Turning Forty." Here's a snippet: "The big four-oh./ Yes, that is soon to be my age./ (And not fifty-eight. No way. That Wikipedia is a bunch of liars.)" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer