Off the Wall Dating Your Mom

By Paul Gray

Some people believe that humorous fiction in The New Yorker has long been legally dead of inanition. Fans of Garrison Keillor and Veronica Geng, two of the magazine's steadiest contributors of whimsy, will disagree. But the most hilarious refutations of this charge have come from Author Ian Frazier, 35, an alumnus of the Harvard Lampoon and a New Yorker staff writer whose stories began bouncing off the wall and into the magazine some ten years ago. These appearances have, to be sure, been infrequent and highly irregular. Dating Your Mom collects a decade's worth of funny business: 25 short pieces, all but four of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. The book can easily be read in one sitting. And that is exactly the wrong way to read it.

Frazier's work glimmers most madly when it is accompanied by the element of surprise. Ideally, spectators should be innocently thumbing through pages of ads, entertainment listings, cartoons and long gray lines of print when they stumble into The End of Bob's Bob House. Whoa. Wait a minute: "In the thirties, it was in the basement of the old Vanderbob Towers Hotel. In the forties, it moved into the first floor of the Youbob Building on Fifty-second Street. In the late fifties, it settled in what was to become its final home, the plush revolving lounge on the top of the BobCo Building." What kind of place was Bob's Bob House? The narrator recalls the hospitality of his host: "My God, I drank the place dry that night, and then I had a good solid piece of American grain-fed beef and got in my car and ran over a claims adjuster and ended up in Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. That's the kind of guy Bob was."

For his part, Frazier is the kind of guy who could, within weeks of New York - City's 1977 power blackout, come up with A Good Explanation, a minute-by- minute recounting of how things might have gone wrong. Sample entry: "8:57 p.m. Every person in Queens between the ages of 14 and 36 gets out of the shower and turns on a blow-dryer. This places an enormous strain on the power reserves of the system." The author likes to convey the impression that he is a serious, high-minded fellow who is simply trying to turn the dross of reality into art. As he says of himself in a postscript to What the Dog Did, "Any experience that happens, it doesn't just have to be a good experience, and--BAM--Ian Frazier will convert it to writing of some kind."

This pose of respectability is part of the joke, of course. Nothing underscores outrageousness better than a no-nonsense manner. Frazier's method reaches an apotheosis of sorts in the title story. Things begin innocently enough: "In today's fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore." In arguing that men should start taking a sexual interest in their moms, Frazier, like any responsible essayist, raises possible objections to his plan: "One problem is that lots of people get hung up on feelings of guilt about their dad. They think, Oh, here's this kindly old guy who taught me how to hunt and whittle and dynamite fish--I can't let him go on into his twilight years alone." Never mind, the author advises: "You have your mother, he has his!"

In The Killion, Frazier reveals the discovery of a number so huge that anyone who sees it written out will instantly die. Similarly, Dating Your Mom may offer more concentrated Frazier than is good for anyone's health. The book should be stored in some inconvenient place and read sparingly, at the rough rate of two stories per year. By 1996 another collection may appear, or given the kind of guy that Ian Frazier seems to be, it may not.