Me Talk Pretty One Day
Foreign Tongue The humorist David Sedaris, with famously sly and hilarious National Public Radio commentaries and three previous books of essays and stories to his name, has, for quite a while, been a darling of that portion of the literati that actually possesses a sense of fun and mischief (it is smaller than you might think). Holidays on Ice,his third book, also universally adored, was short and only contained three new storiesno less funny than the previous two, it was nonetheless a pretty slim package. In a way it was inevitable, then, that his new book, Me Talk Pretty One Day,would be received not only with the by now customary roar of approval but with a certain amount of negative backlash as well, as some critics periodically feel the need to prove that they are as capable of hopping off the bandwagon as they are of jumping on it, and the time is right to hit Sedaris with a bit of revenge for his continued success. And so it is not entirely unexpected that we are beginning to see reviews stating that although he is unquestionably an extraordinarily talented writer, Mr. Sedaris lacks the desire to produce anything of real significance. His salty, barbed observations, while endlessly amusing and insightful, never make it beyond the level of light entertainment. What a load of crapola. The essential fallacy in this thinking, of course, lies in the fact that it is precisely Sedaris' aversion to making too much of the little scenes and scenarios that he captures that makes the writing so enjoyable. He is a master of ferreting out the silly and the poignant from where it lies hidden in the seemingly mundane, and that's one of the reasons that reading him is such a pleasure: He reminds us that things that seem boring never really are if you just give them a little thought. Me Talk Pretty One Daycontains 28 personal essays, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorkerand Esquire.They touch on moments and themes from throughout his life, beginning with his youth in western New York State and North Carolina and moving right on up to his present incarnation as a semi-reluctant expatriate (a term he loathes) in Paris. What was funny, touching, and insightful in his earlier books is again in evidence here, only a bit more so; Sedaris hasn't changed his tune, but he has enhanced it, and the laughs in this collection come at a furious pace. His profoundly bizarre family, whom he clearly loves and whose remarkable weirdness he clearly revels in, figures prominently. Sedaris' father, a character of sublimely comic eccentricity, gets the most attention, but there is also much about his sister, Amy, star of the Comedy Central sitcom "Strangers with Candy," and one story entirely devoted to his younger brother, a gangsta-talking vulgarian who calls himself "The Rooster" and who is responsible for some of the book's choicest moments of hilarity. Pieces written from Paris make up the latter half or so of the collection. They are refreshingly free of loving descriptions of darling little bakeries just down the block from his apartment, sprawling caf scenes, and how the reflected lights of the great city glitter on the Seine at midnight. His observations of French life, filtered through the inimitable Sedaris lens of ecstatic narcissism and brutal self-deprecation, come across as unconventional because he just doesn't seem too terribly thrilled by the place in either a good or bad way; he slaughters Americans in Paris for misinterpreting and failing to appreciate all they come in contact with and does equal damage to the French themselves for a huge catalogue of offenses, but it all feels like part of a day's work. It's just more foil for his scathing w