Sometimes, reading a David Sedaris book can be like pounding your head against a wall. The insistence on the quirky, the fey: It can be very, very tiresome.
In the new book, "Calypso," for the example, there's an endless bit about feeding a benign tumor to a snapping turtle. Sedaris had a growth removed from his abdomen, and he felt an overwhelming urge to give it to a turtle in North Carolina. He seems to think this decision is inherently fascinating and worthy of commentary. It isn't. Every time the fucking snapping turtle appeared--and he appeared with alarming frequency--I wanted to throw the book across the room. Sedaris never says what the reader suspects: There isn't actually a strong bond between the turtle and the narrator, and the turtle is really there as a bit of artificial whimsy. Sedaris has fallen a bit too deeply in love with his own whacky-ness. It's strange to me that someone so gifted, and so established, wouldn't be a more demanding self-editor.
There are other tropes Sedaris needs to retire. One of the weakest essays in the new book has Sedaris traveling all over the world in search of new insults. That's all. We're bored before the conclusion of the first paragraph. (That said, the essay does have this sentence, apparently from Romania: "Why don't you go and stick a hand up your asshole and jerk off your own shit?" So that's something.) There's the unnecessary tale of Sedaris's courtship of a small fox, whimsically called "Carol," whom he encounters in the woods in England. The fox is shoehorned into the role of a non-communicative lover, which is funny for two or three sentences, but which doesn't supply enough juice for a full essay. (Nora Ephron--a Sedaris-ish writer--also derived material from making people, or creatures, into things that they were not. For example, in one piece, she casts Bill Clinton as her own straying boyfriend, and imagines Clinton's presidency as the behavior of a bad boy missing engagements.)
All this aside, "Calypso" has (at least) one great triumph. It's the depiction of Sedaris's sister, Tiffany, dead by suicide in her late forties. Here, you sense Sedaris stretching himself. It's thrilling. Sedaris--who is insistently anti-sentimental--must make himself uncomfortable when he takes on love and death. So you feel uncomfortable, too, in a good way. We piece together Tiffany's story through little asides--a paragraph here, a parenthetical reference there. It's like someone struggling to get a glimpse of the sun (without looking head-on). This is how people actually converse, in the actual world, and there's real power and tension in the knowledge that a good deal is going unstated. It's like the "Sex and the City" episode where Samantha can't comfort Miranda upon the death of Miranda's mother, and all the emotional blockage manifests itself as Samantha "losing her orgasm."
Tiffany Sedaris seemed bipolar and also in possession of a personality disorder (though some might say that those terms do as much obfuscating as they do anything else). You think of an artist with a canvas, just tearing the canvas apart day after day. One time, Sedaris recalls, Tiffany was inexplicably enraged with another sister, and Sedaris tried to intervene. And Tiffany said: "Why don't you go off and write some more about being a faggot?" And that tells you a great deal of what you need to know. Tiffany insisted on being poor, though her upbringing had provided her with many advantages; she lived among torn-up scraps of family photos, and she struggled to hold down a job. It's one shard of psychic pain after another, and eventually Tiffany takes heavy drugs and sticks a plastic bag over her head, and that's the end of that. (In one of the book's sharper moments, Sedaris finds himself wondering whether the bag had a brand name on it--e.g. "Safeway"--or had simple blank space. This deranged aside is the kind of thing DS does very well, as when he travels to the Anne Frank House and finds himself having various interior-decorator fantasies.)
In "Calypso"'s most powerful moment, Sedaris makes a confession. After eight years of silence, Tiffany tried to visit him (this wasn't long before the suicide). Sedaris had just done a reading, and he found Tiffany--"filthy and messy"--waiting in the wings. She was holding out an offering--something in a tattered Starbucks bag. You anticipate a great reckoning, even a reconciliation. But Sedaris doesn't go there. Instead, he coolly instructs one of his bodyguards to show Tiffany to the door. And that's how the encounter ends. In all the surrounding white space, you sense the pain, confusion, torment, exasperation, and life-changing doubt in this one moment, and the writing feels "alive."
I don't doubt that it's very hard to do what Sedaris does. He is from the tradition of Barbara Pym--withholding exposition and analysis, relying very heavily on "showing." It's an art of subtraction. Strip the story to its bare essentials; make the reader do a great deal of work, in terms of inferences, predictions, imaginings. To be so reticent isn't a breezy task. That's why I admire Sedaris; the quirkiness isn't what I sign on for. The quirkiness is just something I endure, while I wait for yet another quiet, shattering depiction of a Divided Self. I hope that Sedaris will continue to extend his own vision, and to rely less and less on snapping turtles, as his career moves on.
In the new book, "Calypso," for the example, there's an endless bit about feeding a benign tumor to a snapping turtle. Sedaris had a growth removed from his abdomen, and he felt an overwhelming urge to give it to a turtle in North Carolina. He seems to think this decision is inherently fascinating and worthy of commentary. It isn't. Every time the fucking snapping turtle appeared--and he appeared with alarming frequency--I wanted to throw the book across the room. Sedaris never says what the reader suspects: There isn't actually a strong bond between the turtle and the narrator, and the turtle is really there as a bit of artificial whimsy. Sedaris has fallen a bit too deeply in love with his own whacky-ness. It's strange to me that someone so gifted, and so established, wouldn't be a more demanding self-editor.
There are other tropes Sedaris needs to retire. One of the weakest essays in the new book has Sedaris traveling all over the world in search of new insults. That's all. We're bored before the conclusion of the first paragraph. (That said, the essay does have this sentence, apparently from Romania: "Why don't you go and stick a hand up your asshole and jerk off your own shit?" So that's something.) There's the unnecessary tale of Sedaris's courtship of a small fox, whimsically called "Carol," whom he encounters in the woods in England. The fox is shoehorned into the role of a non-communicative lover, which is funny for two or three sentences, but which doesn't supply enough juice for a full essay. (Nora Ephron--a Sedaris-ish writer--also derived material from making people, or creatures, into things that they were not. For example, in one piece, she casts Bill Clinton as her own straying boyfriend, and imagines Clinton's presidency as the behavior of a bad boy missing engagements.)
All this aside, "Calypso" has (at least) one great triumph. It's the depiction of Sedaris's sister, Tiffany, dead by suicide in her late forties. Here, you sense Sedaris stretching himself. It's thrilling. Sedaris--who is insistently anti-sentimental--must make himself uncomfortable when he takes on love and death. So you feel uncomfortable, too, in a good way. We piece together Tiffany's story through little asides--a paragraph here, a parenthetical reference there. It's like someone struggling to get a glimpse of the sun (without looking head-on). This is how people actually converse, in the actual world, and there's real power and tension in the knowledge that a good deal is going unstated. It's like the "Sex and the City" episode where Samantha can't comfort Miranda upon the death of Miranda's mother, and all the emotional blockage manifests itself as Samantha "losing her orgasm."
Tiffany Sedaris seemed bipolar and also in possession of a personality disorder (though some might say that those terms do as much obfuscating as they do anything else). You think of an artist with a canvas, just tearing the canvas apart day after day. One time, Sedaris recalls, Tiffany was inexplicably enraged with another sister, and Sedaris tried to intervene. And Tiffany said: "Why don't you go off and write some more about being a faggot?" And that tells you a great deal of what you need to know. Tiffany insisted on being poor, though her upbringing had provided her with many advantages; she lived among torn-up scraps of family photos, and she struggled to hold down a job. It's one shard of psychic pain after another, and eventually Tiffany takes heavy drugs and sticks a plastic bag over her head, and that's the end of that. (In one of the book's sharper moments, Sedaris finds himself wondering whether the bag had a brand name on it--e.g. "Safeway"--or had simple blank space. This deranged aside is the kind of thing DS does very well, as when he travels to the Anne Frank House and finds himself having various interior-decorator fantasies.)
In "Calypso"'s most powerful moment, Sedaris makes a confession. After eight years of silence, Tiffany tried to visit him (this wasn't long before the suicide). Sedaris had just done a reading, and he found Tiffany--"filthy and messy"--waiting in the wings. She was holding out an offering--something in a tattered Starbucks bag. You anticipate a great reckoning, even a reconciliation. But Sedaris doesn't go there. Instead, he coolly instructs one of his bodyguards to show Tiffany to the door. And that's how the encounter ends. In all the surrounding white space, you sense the pain, confusion, torment, exasperation, and life-changing doubt in this one moment, and the writing feels "alive."
I don't doubt that it's very hard to do what Sedaris does. He is from the tradition of Barbara Pym--withholding exposition and analysis, relying very heavily on "showing." It's an art of subtraction. Strip the story to its bare essentials; make the reader do a great deal of work, in terms of inferences, predictions, imaginings. To be so reticent isn't a breezy task. That's why I admire Sedaris; the quirkiness isn't what I sign on for. The quirkiness is just something I endure, while I wait for yet another quiet, shattering depiction of a Divided Self. I hope that Sedaris will continue to extend his own vision, and to rely less and less on snapping turtles, as his career moves on.
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