Ian Frazier is a master of both distilled insight and utter nonsense. His nonfiction books are grandly scaled, immersive examinations of how place, populace, and history create each other. They’re set in the sparsest corners of the American West (Great Plains, 1989), in a multigenerational Midwest (Family, 1994) and on an Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota (On the Rez, 1999). But for all his impeccable reportage credentials—including two decades as a staff writer for the New Yorker—Frazier is also brilliantly, bizarrely funny. His brief, almost miniature comic pieces tend to contain few, if any, jokes; the humor arises from the carefully overwrought language, and the fact that they were written at all. In the collection Dating Your Mom (1986), the long-distance phone calls of Igor Stravinsky are critiqued as if they were newly discovered sonatas. In Coyote V. Acme (1996), one story literally attacks another—a letter-perfect parody of Updikean suburban angst finds itself under siege by a WWII battle narrative. Each piece has a perfectly operating internal logic, which Frazier gleefully commences to amp up until it self-destructs. It’s dizzyingly strange, and hilarious.

This interview began as an email correspondence, then continued as a phone conversation with Frazier in his New Jersey home. He speaks in soft, loping cadences, conveying both a continuous rummaging for the right words and the momentum that comes from finding them, like a man improvising a particularly good bedtime story.

—Jason Roberts

THE BELIEVER: How do you feel about talking about your work in general?

IAN FRAZIER: Talking about writing? Well, I must like to do it. I mean, when I read other people’s I think they’re fatuous, but when I read my own I like what I say.

BLVR: Yet your first-person narratives are remarkable in their lack of self-centeredness. It’s almost as if you subvert the whole authorial-expectations game. Each time you sort of negotiate a new contract with the reader, a means of tackling a subject in depth without setting yourself up as an authority. Do you have a sense of that when you start a project?

IF: Yeah, and I think anybody should. I’m opposed to expertise. For some reason, when I feel I am becoming an expert, I sabotage the whole thing. I mean, I’ve written about the West but I would never want to think of myself as somebody who writes about the West, as an expert on that subject. The problem is, it’s as if you’re either going to be an expert or a dilettante, and I don’t want to be either.

BLVR: When you do talk about yourself, the deflationary aspect of it...