'IT SOMETIMES helps to remind myself that not everyone is like me," David Sedaris writes in his spotty new collection. "Not everyone writes things down in a notebook and then transcribes them into a diary. Fewer still will take that diary, clean i
t up a bit, and read it in front of an audience."
That basic formula for his personal essays has made Sedaris a bestselling author with a huge following, and his writing seems a perfect mirror of a confessional culture that revels in personal revelation – a self-dramatising, post-Seinfeldian talkshow culture in which nothing is too embarrassing or too private or too trivial to recount.
Sedaris is like a stand-up comedian, rummaging through his daily experiences and those of his friends and family members for the comical nugget he can carve and polish (and perhaps exaggerate and embellish) into a shiny anecdote, and then present, with a performer's flourish, to his audience. Everything in his daily existence, it seems, is material.
Many of the acquaintances Sedaris writes about in this book are decidedly unpleasant company. With many of these tales, the reader has the sense that Sedaris is scraping the bottom of the barrel for material, writing for the sake of producing another book, vamping for time instead of looking within or trying something new. His efforts to learn Japanese in 'The Smoking Section' recall his earlier efforts to learn French. And his efforts to satirise Ivy League educations are cringe-makingly lame.
Happily for the Sedaris fan, there are a few gems in this volume, notably 'Crybaby', an account of another airplane trip in which Sedaris encounters a grieving widower, watches a Chris Rock movie and is suddenly reminded of his childhood 40 years ago; and 'Adult Figures Charging Toward A Concrete Toadstool', which recounts his parents' efforts to become art collectors.
These pieces stand out in an incredibly mediocre volume, and remind the reader of what Sedaris can do at his best.
The full article contains 346 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
