I have been on what you might call a David Sedaris binge lately. I reviewed Naked a few months ago and liked it enough to start borrowing other people’s copies. Me Talk Pretty One Day followed along much the same lines as Naked, only funnier. Barrel Fever, his first work, is a bit of a departure, the book being divided into two sections, Stories and Essays.
Seasoned Sedaris readers know his signature easily enough. Pretty much anything goes, the more ridiculous the personal attribute, the better. At particular moments, I wondered if the disclosures he made in Naked didn’t freak out members of his family. Some of my colleagues have even considered that it was a work of fiction, in spite of the narrotor calling himself “David Sedaris.” In Fever, it becomes pretty clear that we’re finally seeing true fiction at last, and with the restraint of “the truth” lifted, the creative sky is the limit.
In his autobiographical books, one gets a good impression of David the daydreamer, and the essence of those fantasy sidebars are what comprise the 12 stories in the first section. The first launches into a heavily conceited testimonial that includes a laundry list of the personal—and gay—relationships between the unnamed narrator and celebrities like Bruce Springsteen, Charlton Heston, Peter Jennings, and Mike Tyson. Each, of course, is perfectly dysfunctional, so this story is rather like Jerry Springer Goes Upper Class. From there it becomes a true buffet, a suicide note that hopes to cause chaos at the funeral, neighborly one-upmanship to the extreme, the not-so-subtle editorial of Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter, a dysfunctional family’s greeting card letter, and so on. There are moments when one forgets that this is fiction, as the narrator takes on a personality trait or two true to the author.
Section two is a return to the autobiographical stuff, and it is here that Sedaris shines. If nothing in book causes you to laugh out loud, it will be here that you were at least close. “The SantaLand Diaries” are included in the 4 essays, which should be recognizable by those Sedaris fans who listen to him on NPR’s This American Life. Except for this one, the essays are quite short but contribute to the well-known storyline with its increasingly recognizable characters. This book is worth it for these bits alone.
Some have said that Sedaris talks down to his reader. I’m not so sure. I think he seeks the dark corners of the human psyche and sheds a very bright light on them. It is easy enough to find something of one’s self within, and the familiarity, no matter how uncomfortable, keeps the pages turning.