(FORTUNE Magazine) – ON THE REZ by Ian Frazier Farrar Straus & Giroux, 295 pages

It takes nerve to be Ian Frazier. While the publishing industry pumps out celebrity tell-alls, management-trainee how-tos, and scary accounts of unlucky mountain climbers, Frazier makes a career writing beautifully about subjects close to his heart and remote from contemporary fashion. His last full-length book, Family (1994), recounted his efforts to trace his WASP genealogy back through several centuries; Great Plains (1989) reported on a 24,000-mile car trip across the unfamiliar territory of Flyover America. His books move at a drowsier pace than contemporary book buyers are accustomed to, and his love for detail sometimes seems indiscriminate. But for those very reasons--for his steadfast contrariness--he is a writer to be prized, and his new book, On the Rez, is a book to admire.

Frazier doesn't want to be thought of as a typical Indian romanticizer--the kind of faux-Indian Anglo we often saw in the hippie era. His understanding of Indians is deep-seated and unblinkered, thoroughly respectful and slightly neurotic. The incorruptible spirit of Crazy Horse haunts Frazier. When his wife decided to redo the kitchen in their Brooklyn apartment, he writes in On the Rez, he was forced to ask himself, "Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?"

That purity of intention is hard to maintain in Brooklyn, of course, so as On the Rez opens Frazier and his family decide to move to Montana. There he will be closer to the Rez--Pine Ridge--where his friend Le War Lance lives. Le figured in Great Plains as a (self-identified) grandson of Crazy Horse whom Frazier befriended in Manhattan in the early 1970s. Le is now in his 50s, a Jack Palance look-alike, an ex-convict, a drunk, a nomad of no fixed address with a mysterious and highly complicated personal history that he lies about frequently. He is also an object of unending fascination for Frazier, and their rocky friendship forms the narrative thread that ties On the Rez together.

But the thread is loosely tied. As with his previous books, Frazier cross-cuts through time, interspersing vast historical research with statistical summaries, accounts of his own travels, and secondhand anecdotes about Le's neighbors and relatives at Pine Ridge. The statistics are grimly familiar--the adult alcoholism rate on the rez is 65%, and almost 30% of the residents are homeless--but the anecdotal material only deepens their grimness. The life of Le and his fellows is an endless series of broken-down cars, abandoned homes, traffic accidents, drunken brawls, unpaid bills, and long stretches of stupefaction before the television set.

Frazier brings all his literary gifts to bear on this squalid story, to recover for it some of the Indians' aboriginal grandeur. "Walking on Pine Ridge," he writes, "I feel as if I am in actual America.... There are wind-blown figures crossing the road in the distance who might be drunk, and a scattering of window-glass fragments in the weeds that might be from a car accident, and a baby naked except for a disposable diaper playing in a bare-dirt yard, and an acrid smell of burning trash--all the elements that usually evoke the description 'bleak.' But there is greatness here, too, and an ancient glory endures in the dust and the weeds."

In such moments Frazier tips his hand: He is too a romantic. But he's no polemicist, and his book is not a tract about the mistreatment of Indians. On the Rez is an effort to summon up a landscape, a culture, and a way of life, and to that end he piles digressions upon anecdotes and anecdotes upon digressions with excessive abandon. The reader may wish he wrote more crisply, but still, Frazier is that rare and brave creature, a writer who dares to risk tedium on the assumption that readers who stick with him will be glad they did. It's hard to imagine a less fashionable attitude nowadays, or for that matter a book less fashionable than this one--a careful evocation of the honor and squalor of Indian life, published at a time when everyone else is giddy over the Nasdaq. Like his subjects, Ian Frazier is a man out of his time.

--Andrew Ferguson

ANDREW FERGUSON is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.